[sf4lifer]

I believe Eric is right. It's often the moments before or after the scheduled meeting when the side conversations happen that build relationships. Sometimes the insight comes 20 minutes after the meeting ends and you walk up to the person at their desk and keep going (even though there is no scheduled meeting). These things are still possible remotely over zoom, but they don't hit the same. In 3 years I think I've answered 3 zoom cold calls (from people I knew). The real value to the company of being in office is unstructured time together.

All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).

[jedberg]

That only works if the team is all in the same office. When everyone is in the same office RTO makes a ton of sense.

When people are spread across multiple offices and all your meetings are on video calls anyway, it's really hard to justify RTO.

And this even applies within the same city. Google has so many offices just in the Bay Area they end up having video calls with local people because it's better than taking a shuttle to another office (same with Apple/Amazon/Meta/etc.)

[sf4lifer]

Totally agreed. This is the part that makes RTO mandates make no sense to me. When I worked in an office, we would video call instead of going up two floors

[dottjt]

What if I don't really want to get to know my colleagues? What if I literally just want to do my work, and have as little of the other benign work shit in my life?

I kind of see getting to know my colleagues as the same as having to commute an hour into work each day. It's just shit I don't want to spend my time on.

[CoolCold]

I like concept of local and global optimals.

For you, your local optimum may be great, but global optimum for the company as a whole may not. And vice versa.

[solarkraft]

This would be so easy to solve with the right software. I'm amazed that even after years of pandemic all the solutions I'm aware of are still such crap.

Discord is pretty good at this (channels, not calls), but there are probably even better paradigms (there still has to be a way to participate in multiple conversations at once).

[Gigachad]

Part of the magic of in person interactions is that it’s all off record. You can say what you really think, share things that are private.

Meanwhile MS Teams wants to put LLMs in their products to scan DMs for problematic thinking. If corporations want to record and scan everything I say, I just won’t say anything anymore.

[solatic]

It's missing from sales, too. Once upon a time, as a salesperson who needed to travel to meet with potential clients, you'd also spend time outside the office - maybe you'd take the client to dinner, maybe the client would host you for a home-cooked meal. It gave you a chance to build rapport with the client and truly understand them and their needs. You'd come to understand when a client was squeezing you for a discount because they legitimately needed one to make the deal happen, versus a client trying to get a discount so that they'll look better to their boss.

When vendor discussions move entirely to Zoom, everything is empty platitudes and keeping the relationship purely transactional. Something is missing. People make up their minds to buy before reaching out, or ghost you when they're no longer interested. The salesperson is just a point-of-contact answering questions and shuttling order forms and contracts. Nobody has a chance to work to earn someone's business anymore.

Zoom is leading the enshittification of the sales process.

[r00fus]

I don't know about you, but in our org (which has a large portion of permanent WFH-ers) I slack someone for a bit, and if they have time (confirmed by viewing their availability on the calendar) we /zoom and chat it up.

No doubt in-hall and water-cooler discussions provide some spice to the drudgery of the work, but for me the biggest challenge of office work is the commute.

So I'm kinda ok with hybrid/flex where 2-3 days are in office. I'm also ok with all the folks who are perma-WFH as long as they are responsive.

[benterix]

Yeah, that's why I really appreciate that my teams meets for a few days every couple of months to plan ahead, it's a great time to know my colleagues better and it improves collaboration when working remotely.

But if someone told me to RTO, I would quit on the same day. There is no way I will work in an office ever again. My employer buys my time, not my body.

[ABeeSea]

Those conversations now happen in slack DMs in my experience.

[gaws]

Hopefully saying nothing you wouldn't want IT to print out and sent to your bosses.

[jedberg]

Or Slack huddles.