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I wonder how much of this might be due to every member of a team being more likely to work out of the same office in a SV located company than in other companie

by sylens 4y ago

I wonder how much of this might be due to every member of a team being more likely to work out of the same office in a SV located company than in other companies. The reason I’ve been so bullish on remote work coming out of the pandemic is because multiple jobs I had before the pandemic were very much remote jobs, with the added requirement of having to perform them from an office building 45-60 minutes away from me. My team was distributed across New York, Florida, Texas, and California, so all of our meetings were using Teams or Zoom anyway. The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Same here. My teams are primarily in Ottawa and Halifax, as well as Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and few stragglers all over the place. Going to office will allow you to talk in person to some of the people but ends up creating massive insulated islands. Remote has put us all on same page and made us communicate, resulting in pervasive awareness. Operationally we are distinctly more effective remote and I shudder for the inevitable return to office where it'll be "you guys in Halifax can't see this on the 1993 broken polycom speaker phone, but Claus is drawing an updated architecture. Sorry you can't hear him he's also far from phone, we'll catch you up later " (they never do)
Tade0 4y ago
I'll do you one better: I've been in a project where our PM was in South Carolina, the bulk of the team in Poland and our single Indian teammate phoned in from Hyderabad. We were all working remotely at the time, but before the pandemic the Polish team would commute to the office.
- scruple 4y ago
  I ran a team where myself and the TPM were local in SoCal, QA was remote in NorCal, and developers were in Texas, Chicago, Argentina, and the Netherlands. It worked surprisingly well but that boiled down to 80% having the right set of personalities.
nerdponx 4y ago
> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance. This exactly. I was already working more or less remotely before the pandemic, but from an office 1 hour from my apartment. I often worked from home anyway and nobody noticed other than my manager, who usually was also working in a different office from me (1 hour drive away) but who insisted that I come into the office whenever possible. Covid gave me the chance to stop wasting my time and energy on the train just to keep up appearances for the person who did my annual performance reviews. My current job is a bit different. Our team is "global", but several of my coworkers actually work in the office near where I live, so going into the office is actually a nice experience. Also my commute is 1/3 what it used to be, which helps.
gumby 4y ago
> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance. This. My gf's company mandated back to the office in mid January 2022 so she went in on the first day...and was the only member of her group to do so. In fact most of the group was in other locations anyway, so she just zoomed from work that day. I remember even before that, working for FAANG the office complexes were so big that most of her meetings ended up on Zoom anyway even if the participants were elsewhere on the same campus.

by sylens 4y ago

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Same here. My teams are primarily in Ottawa and Halifax, as well as Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and few stragglers all over the place. Going to office will allow you to talk in person to some of the people but ends up creating massive insulated islands. Remote has put us all on same page and made us communicate, resulting in pervasive awareness. Operationally we are distinctly more effective remote and I shudder for the inevitable return to office where it'll be "you guys in Halifax can't see this on the 1993 broken polycom speaker phone, but Claus is drawing an updated architecture. Sorry you can't hear him he's also far from phone, we'll catch you up later " (they never do)

Tade0 4y ago

I'll do you one better: I've been in a project where our PM was in South Carolina, the bulk of the team in Poland and our single Indian teammate phoned in from Hyderabad. We were all working remotely at the time, but before the pandemic the Polish team would commute to the office.

scruple 4y ago
I ran a team where myself and the TPM were local in SoCal, QA was remote in NorCal, and developers were in Texas, Chicago, Argentina, and the Netherlands. It worked surprisingly well but that boiled down to 80% having the right set of personalities.

nerdponx 4y ago

> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance. This exactly. I was already working more or less remotely before the pandemic, but from an office 1 hour from my apartment. I often worked from home anyway and nobody noticed other than my manager, who usually was also working in a different office from me (1 hour drive away) but who insisted that I come into the office whenever possible. Covid gave me the chance to stop wasting my time and energy on the train just to keep up appearances for the person who did my annual performance reviews. My current job is a bit different. Our team is "global", but several of my coworkers actually work in the office near where I live, so going into the office is actually a nice experience. Also my commute is 1/3 what it used to be, which helps.

gumby 4y ago

> The fact that I had to ride a train twice a day just to take those zoom calls from a local office was always an annoyance. This. My gf's company mandated back to the office in mid January 2022 so she went in on the first day...and was the only member of her group to do so. In fact most of the group was in other locations anyway, so she just zoomed from work that day. I remember even before that, working for FAANG the office complexes were so big that most of her meetings ended up on Zoom anyway even if the participants were elsewhere on the same campus.