I have been fully remote for about 2 years. My personal experience is that collaboration is way easier when being remote. When I need to talk to a team i just drop a line in their slack room and I usually get an answer within minutes. So much easier than walking down the hallway and hoping that someone is in the team office area (not to mention no social awkwardness involved). Also when most people are remote in your company, you are in most hallway discussions! Just subscribe to the channels and read it. Not to mention lurking when high level engineers talk about stuff. I never really interacted with principal level engineers when I worked in an office. Now I just need to know which channel to listen to.

Having a culture that discusses in public channels definitely helps, though many remote organizations aren’t this way unfortunately and silo chatter to known relevant parties vs any interested group.

What do you do about folks who's first language isn't English? Face to face communication is somewhat doable because body language helps to convey the real message but communicating over text is a completely different ball game. So much nuance gets lost

I find it a lot easier to communicate with polygots whose first language isn't English. A lot of the body language issues go away because everyone actually uses words to say things.

It works better in my opinion. My ESL friends can re-read the words and use a dictionary. They don’t miss things if the conversation is too fast. And you can still video/audio chat if you want. It is the best of both worlds

How do you communicate technical detail via body-language?

Is 100% of your communication with your co-workers always technical details? You never talk about broad concepts and ideas?

Fine. How do you communicate broad technical concepts via body language.

Have you ever talked to humans in real life?

Yes. Is that an answer, or just a dismissive insult?

Do you have co-workers who never have need of any detail or specific nuance? Or do you just mean water-cooler social chat?

Implementation of a task requires broad technical knowledge of what is to be accomplished, as well as specific technical details. How will body language communicate either of those?

I am talking about the process before even starting to implement a task - architecture, designing and brainstorming. We used to do that on giant white boards with markers in our hands. It's not the same when using online diagram tools with trackpads as pens. It's slow, frustrating and not flexible. Ideal solution would be giant touch screens but that's not feasible.

The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat. You can't easily replicate that with a zoom culture.

> The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat.

Is it, really? I always hear and read this, but I see very few anecdotes.

In thinking through my own interactions, I'm not sure anything that happened in the hallway, break room, or at lunch table actually contributed much more to the bottom line than conversations I've had over VC and Slack.

Parts of the story may be apocryphal, but one of the most famous case studies of office design contributing to collaboration is the Pixar office. In the late 1990s (and to this day) the modal layout for larger companies was dividing teams into dedicated buildings by function withn a broader campus or office park.

Per the story, Jobs had the notion of designing an office that encouraged interactions between teams with broad open areas, communal social resources and bathroom placement in central atriums to encourage unplanned interactions between teams.

'Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.” ' [1]

[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-an...

> "Many offices are arranged in U-shaped units of 5-6 individual offices..."

And then they went back to private offices to get stuff done. Both are requirements to the formula for this success.

I've worked from home for about 6 years, but I still went into the office for the occasional meeting and white boarding /idea session. I don't think total remoteness will work very well. You have to have in-person interaction to collaborate effectively. It's just human nature. The delay of voice chat deteriorates the spontaneity of communication.

But going back to work to the all-open concept, where there are, effectively, no private/personal spaces, is also not the way forward. We need to get back to the old-fashioned idea of having offices for knowledge workers, and not just the VP's (who are never there any way).

Depends on you role and where you are in the ladder.

In my experiences, all the big decisions are already made before scheduled meetings take place. Spontaneous one on ones, hall way chats, coffee walks, etc are where those discussions are made, and very often meetings are just an official "let's get everyone on the same page for the record" exercise.

At bigger companies it's almost needed. Harder to desk stalk someone who has been dodging you when they're remote.

I find the same is true for me too. It's much easier to talk about the idea over Slack rather than during some random encounter that is probably the product of either or both parties heading to a meeting somewhere. With Slack, you even get the bonus of having time to think out the exact words you want to use to convey your thought, rather than rush through a simple and undeveloped initial response to some idea.

If you're not networking you're not moving ahead.

That's what they say, but I just don't buy it. In practice even if you get people together in a place with hallways they always tend to stay in their own departments and even at their own desks. Those vibrant conversations you see with carefully selected people from all demographics exist only in marketing brochures.

Is that so? Open source projects (e.g., Linux, Emacs) make lots of progress without a "hallway".

Those don't count because they're not the sort of evidence one would be biased to select to prove the original point.

Look at how slow to progress those were. And they didn't have to focus on immediate business needs.

I'm not super convinced. Most people have never been given the chance to adapt to full-time remote work. And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."

A lot of people are probably more creative in a textual medium or even talking on the phone where they can't be overheard (I hate the feeling I might be distracting someone).

I wouldn't be surprised if the office squelches a lot of creativity. Of course, it all depends on the office environment and individuals.

>And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."

At the start of all this I would have agreed but as the weeks go on my coworkers are just getting more and more introverted and you really have to push to get any sort of discussion about product and strategy, everything ends up into a meeting format you can't just do the sitting down, riffing and chatting which is where the actual creative work happens.

Might have a different perspective because I'm more on the design side than the engineering, but I'm very aware none of the most transformative moves in my company were all born out of discussions outside of work in more social settings between designers and engineers, I know some people don't like hearing that but that's the reality at my company at least.

Yep, I can see how FAANGs would be reluctant to adopt remote work. While it can be a fine solution in your run of the mill software team doing boring web or backend work, FAANGs are all about innovation and, often, very technically complex products. The f2f interactions could really foster creativity there (just imagine scientists trying to work out the Manhattan project remotely over Teams...).

I think you're over estimating the complexity of what FAANG engineers work on :)

As the saying goes, we spend our lives converting one proto into another.

Seems like it would be more useful for design/ux/product to be in a room. Trying to whiteboard online is painful.

Working is not just about work, we're spending a good amount of our time with our colleagues. I cannot imagine me sitting alone in a room, working every day 8 hours for 10-20 years and never meet anyone in my team. All the team building, get a smoke together, off-work activities... are gone. Sounds scary like a chapter in Black Mirror.

In theory you would be trading hanging out with your coworkers for hanging out with your friends, you neighbors, others in your community + a lesser commute. You would definitely lose some and gain some, the question is whether that gain would outweigh the loss. For some people, their lives are organized around work (makes sense, mine defiantly is) so it would be a big shift.

Yeah, calling this a trend would be stretching this a bit. From what I have seen myself and heard from friends in other FAANG or other medium/big tech companies, a lot of employees prefer to work from office and are not liking the current WFH situation. I know of one survey inside a big company where majority of the people voted for being in the office for at least a few days of the week once the situation is better.

They can just change the policy back at anytime.

And what, tell everyone to move to San Francisco tomorrow?