I spent three years working from home in the pre-pandemic era, at GitHub - the king of remote culture at the time - and I was desperate to have an office again.

I spent three years working from home in the pre-pandemic era, at GitHub - the king of remote culture at the time - and I was desperate to have an office again. I can code fine at home (better, actually, with more privacy to focus), but I can’t do the meta-stuff nearly as well. It’s the soft-skills that suffer. I think my pandemic-era company failed (we got acquired but, it was a failing-up situation) because we lost the ability to have course-correcting conversations outside of formal meetings. Which is to say: we just weren’t as smart, as a group. We should have done a daring pivot, but there was no way to discuss it (zoom+figma “brainstorming” sessions were completely useless) I think my ideal would be to have somewhere that we met in person semi-regularly, maybe optionally, like a study hall environment, where we could pair or whiteboard or just chat. I don’t want to go back to being crammed into an open-office with too many people, that is just awful for coding. and Slack is like being in an open-office 24 hours a day; I hope my next gig doesn’t use it.