We have some processes with high interaction on our development, and when people were considering going back to the office (in the end, we didn't) we met and decided how we would do then now. The remote option worked so much better than in person that there wasn't any discussion.

I do think it's much easier when everyone is remote though. It sucks when half the people in a meeting are in a conference room and the rest are remote. You end up dealing with dumb technical difficulties and its too easy to exclude virtual folks from the conversation.

Most offices I’ve been in have had deficient conference room setups and open floor plans, and I’ve come to enjoy the ease with which private conversations, pairing, and ad hoc meetings can happen without being disruptive to others or booking a room way in advance.

I do think that conversations have higher bandwidth in person, and I’ve really missed having a proper big whiteboard to gather around, but I’ve come to realize that this restriction can be a positive forcing function for organizations to write things out and maintain more organized planning documents, which is a desirable outcome.

Let's be honest, I love my current team and company, and we have enough overlap (5 hours difference in the worst case) that it's relatively straightforward.

Like, in-person is substantially higher bandwidth. Remote has lots of things that make up for it, but let's not pretend there's no difference.

Occasional all hands conferences provided some IRL a few times a year. IME these weren't strictly necessary yet did provide a chance to bond with the people on the other side of the glass.

Career wise I do think that fully remote can be a boon to shorter and less attractive coworkers, since it reduces or eliminates some of the tall+beautiful biases.

  - Chat workspaces like Slack requires very different etiquette
  - Zoom and video meetings requries a different etiquette. You can't use body language to signal when you want to speak. On the other hand, the chat backchannel enables interactions you can't do with in-person meetings.
  - Writing and speaking engages different areas of the brain. Someone who is good at speaking is not necessarily be as good as writing, and vice versa
  - In-person work favors good speakers, and remote work favors good writers
  - The intuitions for how much to communicate is different between in-person and on remote. If you are used to in-person work, remote work requires a communication style that will feel like overcommunication, but it is not.
  - Socialization on remote, distributed teams are less spontaneous and requires more concious effort
  - When there's an in-person gathering with some remote people, remote-people tend to get forgotten. Decisions and ideas favor the people in-person. 
  - When I joined my first distributed team (that's not as a solo contractor), the engineering manager made sure the team still got together periodically, because there are some things you can do in-person that is not so easy with remote. This can include going to conferences. It is far easier to get to know someone as a person (and not as their role) in-person than it is by remote
  - Some line of work favors remote than in-person, and vice versa. Software engineering can favor remote ... but not as much for creatives (like game studios) or sales.

The company I work for now organically grew into a distributed company. It did not start out that way, and the fully remote guy who came in before me pioneered the practices, equipment, to make that happen. (E.g. company all hand meetings were remote Zoom even though most of the people worked in the same office). The engineering team embraced remote-first, starting with the remote, morning standup. Some of the sales team in the field would remote in from time to time. When the lockdown came, the sales team got hit the hardest. They made it work, pioneered things like social time, and ended up embracing it when they hired remote from all around the country. Remote became part of the company culture.

Btw, I'm also a big fan of remote working, but no matter how good your communication skills are, you're left behind on the longer term within an hybrid team. You just can't build all these relationships with smalltalk etc. that's another problem

We have better text-based work communication tools than ever, there are so few good justifications for getting large groups together at the same time.

Yes there are certainly some cases where in-person meetings are for more preferential for discussing complicated topics, but i think 90% of it can be done virtually. Also I think there are some (white collar) positions where their job duties rely more heavily on in-person interactions too, and those might be more on the upper-management and executive levels, but those shouldn't dictate every position in the company.

But for new big ticket business I think it's hard to replace the in person meeting. The ritual of going somewhere new to meet someone new to do something new is probably not going away, and it seems likely that people will agree that there's a comfort in it. You need a bit of commitment in new relationships, it can't all be speed dating from your home office.

But like also a person is allowed to not like in person meetings. Feels weird to force it. Honestly the live captions, running transcript, side chat, multi-screen share, and hand raise feature alone make remote meetings better than in-person for actual work.

Collaboration was through the roof. Maybe it's how our previous virtual meetings were run, but it felt like items like planning, architecture discussions and reviewing strategy documents was 5x more productive in person than virtual.

Remote work has so many things going for it, it does not make sense to me to use a different model.

Commute time is eliminated, as are commuting costs. That is time better spent.

Remote communications have a built in forcing-function making us gather our thoughts before we type them in or call someone. This isn't a barrier to most. Is for some, typically the people who do a fair bit of idle chat or don't tryto solve things themselves for at least 20m before asking others.

Remote communications can be recorded. Serves as both a knowledge repository that can be gone back to, and as an audit trail for legal purposes.

Remote communications allow tools to be built into the conversation. In person we have a whiteboard, and someone has to take a photo of the whiteboard when done.

Remote communications allow collaboration with wide area geographies where in-person travel would be too costly to do frequently (e.g., England and U.S.).

Remote communications can be async, allowing staff who keep different schedules to easily collaborate.

This could be as simple as another layoff, but I think it's more management that are used to the usual way of doing things. In my experience with remote vs non-remote I have seen a clear bias of older management to be less likely to embrace remote comms. I've also seen plenty of outliers on both ends, so that hypothesis might not hold water. I am curious what the age range of Roblox management is, compared to remote-first companies like Github.

There is just enough latency in video conferencing that people start talking at the same time a lot. This is fine in short meetings. But when we wanted to discuss larger structural changes for longer periods of time, it was exhausting. It worked much better in person.

> Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.

That also provides lots of value in my book. People talk about random shit and sometimes that creates good ideas. Also it's just nice to actually meet the people you work with.

I'm not saying you need constant off-sites, but meeting up sometimes is great.

My previous company, we did the fully remote thing pre-pandemic and had a good culture, but I found meeting up once a quarter was really effective.

Reasons why: 1- No one has solved the remote whiteboarding problem. There is nothing quite like a few people sitting around a whiteboard, drawing pictures, looking in the whites of each others eyes to see if they really understand, and debating the tradeoffs. You can simulate this remotely, but its just not nearly as effective in my experience. In general, I found that about once every 3 months we would have a pile of problems and things we are seeing as potential problems on the horizon that we want to brainstorm on how to fix in a way that chat did not facilitate well. In fact, I would send out a list of these items ahead of time so we could deliberate on them and then present ideas. Things like: "We seem to be generating a lot of metrics that cost a lot of money to store and we only use them when debugging thorny problems- how do we try to make these smaller/more useful?"

2- Text communication is great to a point, but sometimes perceived slights can build up, or maybe someone's communication style is just off putting to you, and you start to build up animosity or perceive there to be animosity that just isn't there. Breaking the ice by just talking to the person in person almost always makes that friction go away.

2a- Often you work with someone and may think they are not performing, or not very smart, or an **hole or whatever, and sitting next to them for a day or two makes you empathetic to their situation as you see how many times they are getting pinged by other teams/people. Sometimes sitting next to them makes you realize they really are a problem and you can start focusing on your efforts on routing around that.

3- It lets you get to know people socially. I find that as we move into an ever more surveilled environment, just talking over slack becomes an ever more fraught endeavor. Discussions about the difficulties your kids may be giving you or the fact that you had a little too much fun last weekend are now archived and mineable for more or less forever. It just puts a real damper on making a connection with your team mates. I have a real example of this at the end of this post.

4- Its fun? Getting away roughly once every three months and spending time face to face, in a new city, is generally pretty enjoyable. We would try to do a different region each time so that no one was stuck traveling a far distance all the time- and in the cold winter months, we would try to go to a warmer location, and vice versa. The ability to socialize with coworkers outside of coworkers was always enjoyable for me.

Real example of socializing on work channels gone bad: At a fairly brutal place I worked at during the pandemic, which reluctantly allowed remote work, I was chit chatting with a coworker I was friendly with, and mentioned how I had had to work the previous three weekends, which was really grating on me, and I had pushed back on checking out another change the upcoming weekend because I needed a "Mental health weekend." This got flagged by some system, next thing you know I am getting a call from my boss asking if everything is ok, and he wouldn't admit at the time, but they were actively surveilling our messages and looking for stuff like this amongst other things mostly related to IP theft, insider trading, etc.