I was working at a place where the CTO was remote--same city, different building, maybe 15 minutes away by bus or whatever. They had a "day job" as some ivory t

I was working at a place where the CTO was remote--same city, different building, maybe 15 minutes away by bus or whatever. They had a "day job" as some ivory tower researcher. We basically endeavored to remove them from as many decisions as possible, and tried to find ways of working on the codebase so they were no longer the single owner of things. We didn't go far enough, I think. Their priorities weren't really our priorities and vice versa, because they didn't see us suffering through their design decisions, and because whenever we brought up new features or tech it was always kinda seen as a potential threat to their research ("Well, if this business fails, I've still got to maintain everything, and at least I know how to maintain what we've got", "Oh, well, that change means I would need to reprocess all my collected data", etc.). They would go and talk to folks and wheel and deal, and it was apparent to us that they never really knew what was happening "on the ground". Least of all, this meant that they favored solutions that were very conservative. They weren't good at scheduling tasks because they had a mental model of how long their part of the codebase took to work on (taking into account frequent external interruptions that the dedicated FTEs on our site didn't have) and they didn't feel any burning need to transfer their knowledge to us because that was a slow and annoying process (we only saw each other a few times a week, maybe in the afternoons after work for like an hour...hardly enough time to do a technical handoff, so why bother). It was pretty frustrating. EDIT: To tie this back in...we had email, we had a group chat I pushed for, and other things. It's just that the little things like being able to look up from your desk and judge by their body language that something is bugging one of your engineers or physically pinging somebody who hasn't answered on chat for a while were missing. There's also the chat problem of doing a batch update on chat messages and because of timing and the inability of text to accurately convey emotions having a big misunderstanding leading to a grumpy phonecall. That happened a couple of times.