[zeroq]

it is both harder and very different.

Given that there are plenty of people on the spectrum working in IT a promotion can be a devastating blow to some.

The thing you've mentioned about poor performance resonates a lot with an unfinished text I have about generation lost to covid.

For me shaping a new team is all about forming bonds between teammates. Living in eastern europe it usually involves a lot of drinking together. :)

The end result is that you have a team that cares about each other, and if someone has a bad day for whatever reason (sick cat, kid misbehaving at school, hangover or divorce) the rest of the team will be happy to fill out and carry on as a unit. If something bad will happen the team will indicate the bad apple and you'll know when to step in.

Even though my first daily job in 2006 was an online first company I was very sceptical when covid started. It takes a lot of thought and preperation to have your org ready for an online work, and setting up zoom calls is simply not enough. I took hiatus as I felt I was not able to form a functional team based on skype calls. I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.

[AbstractH24]

I'm not going to lie, this is what I feel work from home and distributed teams has made hardest.

It's not that it can't be overcome, but it has to be done intentionally rather than organically. And that's a whole task a manager needs to add to their list of responsibilities.

Never thought of that before.

[gedy]

> I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.

Maybe, but I will say that having the norm be "unless you hang out in person your team can't bond" is an out for some people to excuse not being friendly or empathetic. Friendly people are friendly no matter the medium.

I've had managers hand-wring over getting people to hang out, and it's like: okay, I've drank beer with this difficult person that you hired, can they stop being an asshole in chat now?

[zeroq]

My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.

People will join the stand up call saying routine like "hello yesterday no blockers", proceed to grab a random task from the backlog and call it a day.

Meanwhile in the office people will have a casual chat over a coffee, go for a smoke, grab a lunch together and maybe even hang out after work on their own accord. When someone shows up late for office saying "crap my kid is really sick" it's more likely that someone else steps in and say "hey, it's fine, I'll do the deploy for you today".

When someone asks for that in a group chat people may miss it, and honestly, who cares about random set of pixels on your screen.

Not to mention that in the office, if you're not an asshole, people will stay with you after work and be willing to teach you how to work with that new library or system. I'm not seeing that organically happening in full remote structure where you can't really put a face behind a name.

Like I've said, I worked for fully remote companies long before covid happened, but everytime those companies invested a lot of time and money to get people together and do random meaningless stuff. Heck, when I joined Wikia in 2006 they flew us all from all around the world for basically two weeks vacation so we just could spend the time together and to get to know each other.

[gedy]

> My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.

Sure that's fair.