Ehh I think this comment is what the root comment was critisizing. I think a more empathetic lens is that you can either provide a remote-first or in-office-first experience for a team, and that at a larger office many or most teams being remote-first would detract from the office-first experience. I think it's short sighted to assume that having 200 people primarily in the office would be significantly different than 400 people, for example, but going from 400 to 10 certainly would.

The good thing is that after companies finish out corona, engineers will have more remote-first work options and still plenty of office-first options - I don't think there will be much in the way of hostage taking, but I'm sure some folks will be (rightfully) miffed if they joined a team for one experience and post-pandemic are getting a different one. They are also able to find a new job :)

Replace Zoom with whatever meeting solution you like, but it's probably for the best that all meetings be on some sort of meeting platform long term.

At least in my experience, people seldom take notes during meetings; they rely on their memory and forget about everyone else that didn't attend. Not to mention that if you're typing on your machine during a meeting it's assumed that you're not paying attention. Even just recording everything can be good so you can go back later to review critical decisions.

> People don't really want to be fully remote at a company where most of their co-workers go back into the office most of the time

At least from my perspective, I dread this idea because, as employees who were already mostly remote found out a long time ago, employees at the office will typically neglect remote coworkers. Be it through not meeting in an accessible format, not sharing important decisions, or similar oversights.

I've personally experienced great improvements in terms of team coordination due to WFH: we've scheduled meetings in advance, we have notes for key decisions, there are proper documents for inter-team coordination (instead of relying on memory and ad-hoc discussions), etc..

> people mostly don't want to go back into an office where it's mostly just teams having all-day meetings now and then.

Do you mean the scenario where employees come in a limited number of days for meetings? Or where everyone is in the office 100% of the time with certain days that are all meetings?

Personally, I think the former makes best use of in-office time. This does vary per person, but I think the best use of the office is as a collaborative space; it's the main feature everyone seems to be lamenting. So use it for its advantages.

So get the collaborative benefits and then let everyone else get their work done. This is much more personal, but I absolutely hated people dropping into my team neighborhood and interrupting me with questions/trying to locate someone. If you want some of my work time, that's OK, but you can't do it whenever you feel like it; schedule time and stop pre-empting my tasks.

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WFH in general seems to require more structure than in-office work. This adds some overhead for individual employees, but likely will result in massive gains long term. If your meetings are scheduled, there's more time to prepare. If everyone is taking notes, then there's less need for meetings to understand decisions made elsewhere.

Ancillary communication tools were severely under-used before WFH. I'd be happy if we went mixed-office after learning how to coordinate more effectively, but I consider it likely that in the rush to get back people will drop the ball and work will reset to in-office vs WFH.

What I meant is that individuals who would prefer to be in an an office come in and mostly the only other people there are other groups doing their own thing.

And I agree about the structure. Where I work, people have been pretty good about using shared docs--Etherpad for a long time and Google Docs now. But with everyone on video calls, shared docs are now used pretty religiously for most meetings.

Also agree about the use of office. I'm happy to come into an office now and then if it's for a particular purpose. I've no interest in coming into one to work individually or maybe run into someone and have a serendipitous conversation. Serendipity is fine but it's actually pretty inefficient.