A lot of discussion here about productivity and flow of information. For me, the biggest downside of remote was something less measurable: it's much harder to

A lot of discussion here about productivity and flow of information. For me, the biggest downside of remote was something less measurable: it's much harder to build rapport with people you can't hang out with. Even more so with people you've never met. From the article: > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. You could ascribe this clinically to "communication patterns" etc, but I think the deeper reason is that many of those "bridges" were friendships that stopped happening. This is a huge cost that goes beyond money or anything else you can put a number on. -- Early in Silicon Valley history, there was a bar in Mountain View called the Wagon Wheel. Engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor, from Intel, Apple, other pivotal early companies would get beers after work. How many ideas do you think were hatched there, shared across department lines or between competitors? The Atari guys reportedly beta tested Pong by bringing it to the Wagon Wheel and watching people play.