[parpfish]

Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:

The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.

But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention

[ghaff]

And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.

It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.

[jobs_throwaway]

> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room

And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.

[ghaff]

They call from their desks. Just like people did in the not so "old days." Back when I was a product manager I spent a good part of my day on the phone in my cubicle.

[parpfish]

the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it

[scarface_74]

There are two rules about any job I take these days.

1. I will not work at in office job.

2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.

[ponector]

Hard to follow this rules unless you are living in a low cost of living area.

Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.

[scarface_74]

I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.

She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?

I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).

I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.

I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.

[widforss]

Sp you want to be the special remote guy?

[scarface_74]

I said just the opposite. I don’t want to be the special remote guy. I want to work for a company where everyone is remote.

[widforss]

Ah, missed a word.