I was the 10th employee at my current company, hired roughly four years ago. I joined during Covid, but it was a fully-remote, geographically distributed compan

I was the 10th employee at my current company, hired roughly four years ago. I joined during Covid, but it was a fully-remote, geographically distributed company from the beginning before Covid happened (founded about nine months before I joined). I think we're up close to 100 now but I'm not even sure. I can't say we faced any particular or abnormal challenges around cohesion and productivity. Truth be told, I have often felt I barely knew most other people in the company, but it really didn't matter. I knew the software and I knew the customer I was working with. There typically might be 2-3 fellow employees I'm working with on any given project and I get to know them reasonably well for the duration of the project, but there aren't permanent teams and we're not doing something like playing a team sport that requires careful orchestration and practice. As long as work can be split up into discrete tasks with relatively minimal cross-dependencies, you can mostly work alone and only schedule touch points where those dependencies become blockers. The tools and practices are Git, e-mail, channel-based chat servers, possibly video calls but only if you need to screenshare. I've never really seen the value in being able to see someone's face, frankly. It's a distraction more often than not. Yeah, body language, but I can still understand and use Linux perfectly well even though I don't know what Linus's face looked like when he wrote it. Obviously, there was no transition, but as it stands, our customers have often wanted us to hire people who were near them rather than near some arbitrary city we chose to put an office in, so being able to hire from anywhere has always been helpful in actually being able to do that. Ironically, the last time I had an office-based job, which to be fair, had to be office-based no matter what because the work was classified, much of my team was still geographically distributed anyway and I never met them, either.