5 ms·
> I would be really surprised to find anyone at the top of performance in any organization that isn't fully remote without resorting to Machiavellian tactics.
by ramphastidae 7y ago
> I would be really surprised to find anyone at the top of performance in any organization that isn't fully remote without resorting to Machiavellian tactics.
Can confirm. Switching to a fully remote company was eye-opening. The politics are much worse than my office jobs.
Everything is back-channeled. So many secret private Slack channels and exclusive in-person meetups where actual decisions are made.
At least in the office you could get a sense of the political landscape after a few weeks of meetings — I was unaware of how my remote organization actually worked for over a year until I raised some concerns and a co-worker clued me in.
The shocking thing wasn’t that a remote company has politics, but that the entire company ethos was based on how much more transparent and less political fully remote organizations are.
- xrd 7y agoThis says it. Yikes.
- cs02rm0 7y agoFWIW it hasn't been my experience. I've spent about 9 years working with a fully remote company. The back channels exist, mostly as video calls in slack, but to me that's no different than a conversation in a quiet corner of the office. You can usually sniff out who talks to who and what the relationships are like. I find you do have to call people though, if you isolate yourself in a remote company it's probably even more, well, isolating. No one's going to accidentally bump into you.