I work at Google and I agree with the poster that something significant is lost when you aren't physically present near each other.

But I am also fully remote at Google and I am never going back. Full remote is too valuable to me. I just think that it is useful to be honest about challenges that some people and teams face with remote work.

Thank for you saying this so clearly. It really articulates my own feelings.

Something is lost when you give up in person collaboration. But that can be fine and perhaps it has no real impact on your team’s productivity. And even with this loss, the benefits of remote working can greatly out weigh the drawbacks. But I think it’s worth being honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it’s a balancing act, and not try to say that remote work is superior in all aspects.

I can agree that "something" is lost. Just not what everyone is saying or thinks it is. I doubt anyone really knows. But agree that full remote is a different way of working and people need to get used to it still.

My experience has aligned with the person you're responding too. Often the best ideas came out of lunch conversations, slam diagramming on hallway white-boards....

It's strange (and also independent if real or virtual), but for me the worst ideas actually came out of those meetings where people "needed to brainstorm to come up with solution" - and usually also endless technical debt. The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team, draft something up, and again others can have time to think this through and thoroughly review. Not that the other thing also sometimes happens, but majority not. Different problem domain, skills? (But anyway, totally independent if virtual or not..)

Design by committee (where few are competent in the issue at hand) is different than the right people being in any kind of meeting.

Lots of people waste time and hide in online meetings too.

> The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team

I like to say that small meetings of 2-4 people are great for figuring out what to do, and larger meetings are great to have a discussion about the plan made by the smaller meeting. It constrains the discussion and helps to limit rat-holing.

This can still happen.

Let’s be deliberate about it - eg “hey let’s grab lunch together and then whiteboard out a few ideas”

To me, this kind of deep collaboration is a reason to be in the same physical space.

Though it only actually happens a handful of times a year - even if you sit next to the collaborators daily.

A recurring calendar invite can increase the frequency of good types of meetings too :)

Agree.

20+ years ago, it was considered good office manners to send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence.

> send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence

Unless someone ignores IM (not even seeing notifications), sending a message is also interrupting…

I disable all notifications and just check IMs and emails every time I reach a place where that's not harmful to my work.

If they don’t respond…they’re not available.

You can disable slack notifications. It’s great, as long as you remember to periodically check it.

This needs to be relearned both in person and online.

Poor planning on someone else’s part shouldn’t make an emergency on your part.

In the olden days, you could “spontaneously” be productive by spending 2 hours talking to coworkers about something that will never ship - meanwhile the due date for your actual project just went out by 2 hours.

I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.

> Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.

As someone with ADHD, there are a lot of seeming “anti-productive distractions” I use to help me focus, but which would never be allowed in an office environment.

I’ve measured it: I’m more long-term productive at work when I’m also doing chores, talking to friends, petting my cat, watching YouTube videos, etc. at the same time. The social pressure to not be doing these things (or the impossibility of doing these things in an office), starves my brain of the input required to solve work problems. If the only thing I have to focus on is work… then I don’t.

> Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.

This does not match my experience at all. If my coworkers and managers are bad at collaborating with remote workers then I will not be as effective working remotely no matter how good I personally am at it.

Supporting remote work allows a company to attract employees from a larger pool of labor which allows them to to get higher caliber employees while paying the same or lower salaries. It also saves on office costs. I'm not surprised to see more companies doing this.

But doing so also requires adopting culture, processes, and tools across the entire organization. It's not something an individual worker can do on their own.

Of course, you and I both know that this is the first, second, and only reason for RTO: everybody who doesn't know how to program a computer is convinced, and will remain convinced until the day they die, that the only way to keep us programmer grunts "productive" is to have somebody standing behind us monitoring our behavior with a clipboard 40 hours a week.

I cowork, meaning I work in a coworking space I pay for. This is significantly preferable to commuting for an hour each way to my actual office.

Such a remote scenario also heavily favors "extroverts" and other such people that are happy to "hop on a meeting" with someone. The key is that it's not "hop on a meeting", that's easy for an extrovert, it's that you're interrupting someone and taking time out of their day, and you don't want to disturb etc etc. Introverts, "shy" and other such non-people people, will struggle with that and they'll have t re-learn working in a work environment.

You get people that are "selfish" in that regard (yes you get introverts like that too) and don't mind taking up someone else's time or interrupting them. WFH heavily favors those people, and no one is speaking up about this.

In-person work is way worse for this. Extroverts are constantly bugging everyone with small talk, talking loudly on the phone, in the kitchen, the hall, the bathroom...

Extroverts walk around and bug random people to get their "fix". Things should be async when you're remote. If someone pings you to meet, just ignore it until you are ready to deal with it. That's impossible in the office.

I agree that's what extroverts do - and it's definitely an interruption! But this scenario specifically is when the "introvert" needs to initiate a talk to someone. I'd argue that that is much easier in the office when the perceived amount of "interruption" they would cause to the other person is low, and when the natural flow of the conversation can bring up an entry point for them. It also makes it more likely for their manager/senior/mentor to notice they are having an issue without them having to initiate.

Thing is, the extroverts will now do the same, they'll just do it remotely and schedule incessant '1 on 1's with their reports, who are more likely to be introverts.

Overall, it's not an easy problem to solve and optimize. But the preference then should be to do what we've always done and slowly "peek" into potential different ways of doing it, instead of dropping the bomb and saying full WFH or full Y and here is why X or Y is correct.

Honestly, I don't see how it could be easier for introverts in the scenario you mention. If an introvert needs something when they're WFH, they just send a slack message. I probably doesn't even require a face to face interaction.

For reference, I manage a fully remote team and we do one real-time video meeting a week, the rest is pure text and async. We are a very high performing team that consists of people new to the industry as well as veterans.

Introvert and extrovert are pretty blunt terms, there are people who find it easy to talk to others and those who find it difficult even when necessary, these might but do not need to correspond to wanting to talk to others (among other nuances). Introvert usually groups those who have difficulty and those who dislike talking to others, but with work from home that grouping doesn’t necessarily make sense.

If it’s harder for you to initiate conversations, bumping into people and common office occurrences can make it easier to start talking. But if you don’t like talking to others than bumping into people can feel intrusive.

As an introvert with Asperger and an adamant pro-office guy I can't relate, what you describe sounds more like social anxiety or sociophobia, and require proper treatment (also facing (semi)professional conversations is a good treatment of its own since you know the topic and the people)

> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.

> Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it.

...probably because the scenario has been framed as a benefit and it is clearly not.

It's a lot easier to hit someone up on slack, as normalized behavior, than having to "accidentally" run into them in a hall. I know all the people I work with. I know that I can access them as a resource. When in the office or at home, if you can't initiate ideation without happenstance, you have a behavioral problem that is masked by working in an office.

I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.

That one example sold me.

Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.

(Edit: note, I’m pro-working from home, but I don’t agree that you can 1:1 recreate in-person ideation/spontaneity over a screen with scheduled meetings. Based on the downvotes I guess that’s a controversial opinion in 2023. Wild.)

> Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.

In person or remote, if there are other meetings I'm not hanging out, I'm off to the next one.

> Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom

Videoconferencing is the wrong tool for that sort of thing. IMs are a much better tool for that.

> my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly

This is my experience with in-person meetings, too. The millisecond the meeting is over, everyone goes back to work.

> I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.

How much of that $1M was reflected in your paycheck?

Seems off topic, but the equity I’ve been compensated with has been sufficiently worthwhile and I don’t feel hard done by. YMMV.

I have random chats in the "watercooler" channels with like minded people. It's whether you're interested in anything - not whether you hang out in the right room.

I hang out in those rooms too. My experience doesn’t mean good ideas don’t or can’t happen there. But I personally feel more “creatively productive” when I can read the room and gauge folks’ expressions/enthusiasm.

People are different. What works for me may not work for you, your team, company culture, etc.

Mind that I work with physical products so often collaboration involves talking about and handling actual objects, but I've found that the team I'm on has lost something when relying on virtual collaboration sessions where only one of the people actually has the item they are talking about. This is especially true for the more junior members of the team who require more collaboration.

When I'm in the office I get practically nothing done due to this, but the end effect is that the whole team is more efficient since others are unblocked with a clear direction. This just doesn't happen as well when we are relying on someone reaching out to setup a call where we try to talk through a problem that is better solved by actually standing around to collaborate. I also see it happen with the newer teams in other locations, we miss the small details in things that you only think to talk about when you are sitting in a meeting room over a prototype that gets passed around.

I know that different people not only have quite different preferences but also different working styles, but I generally agree with this.

IME the slight extra friction of initiating a call acts as a filter which means that I am less likely to ask colleagues either something which only saves me a few seconds, or to just start a nebulous discussion. Text chat is the right medium for both of these, even when in the office, as it's asynchronous and no one else has to hear it. When I call someone I tend to have at least a clear question or request for something that will make a significant different to what I can get done today.

The other argument against the benefits of face-to-face communication is that, unless everyone in your org works in the same city (or even, on the same floor - since most people don't walk around huge offices to ask colleagues quick questions), you should be practising with the online communications and finding good ways of working with them anyway. Otherwise fully distributed teams degrade into geographic silos, and teams with only a few remote people tend to just leave them out.