Politics is tricky. I have/had to do a lot more public relations. Starting/running book/video clubs, making time for 1:1s with coworkers, I even did a 2+ year stint of starting off the morning slack chats with a dad joke, that was very appreciated. There are many ways to be productive, but I had to find ways to stay noticed, likable, relevant, and appreciated outside the pull requests. As my former manager said, if no one remembers who you are, you will become just a line item on the payroll.

I do something pretty similar. Friday's I will somewhat regularly send a dad joke or meme. These of course stay non-political and very SFW.

On a somewhat serious side. I try to regularly send "tips". If I learn something that I think is beyond cool I'll send an email teaching that new cool thing. If it can't be done in an email I'll setup small sessions to teach that over Zoom. I prefer Zoom because it's more impactful as far as being "seen" and not just another email.

Relaying what I've learned (even basic things) works really well, at least my regular 1:1's and reviews support this view.

I think your experience is really interesting, because as a dev our work can be hard to measure, unless you're working on something huge and very visible, so this interpersonal part of the work becomes very important, kinda like your manager said, you have to be remembered for something more than just "that guy we pay to make code".

This allows you to bypass the politics situation pretty well. Interact professionally with the people you need to, get your work done, and get your social and drama needs met elsewhere, like with real friends and family :-P

If you're very confident in yourself and your work though this probably is less of a problem.

In a remote environment you have no idea if you're interrupting someone when you give them a call, so you need a proper reason to call someone. People discuss things in closed conference calls, chat rooms and email chains, so if they don't invite you you will never learn about any opportunities yourself.

If half the team is wfh it just seems like those in the office will be in the loop more consistently, especially if the team lead is also in the office. There's a lot of questions I feel comfortable asking casually if the person I want to ask is nearby but not by sending them an email or during a meeting.

There is this bot on slack called donut that every company I've been uses. Basically it prompts 2 or more random people to catch up every week or how often you think not annoying. I don't think I had more than that back in the office days but you could send slack messages to people how often you want if you like more.

In my team, most of the times, anything important needs to be sent to the channel for transparency and more chance of getting picked up. Private messages are not expected to be as important nor get an immediate reply so people won't feel bothered when you send one. Then there are also things more purposefully async such as github issues and wikis.

I was a remote employee (IC) for about 12 years, and this was a recurring problem. I was one of a handful of remotes in a global team across several time zones, so at some level everybody had to deal with this problem: I didn't have a good handle on the office politics in the US, but the people in the US had just as tenuous a grip on the office politics in Singapore, and so on.

Somehow it usually worked out OK, but we had a director who was very good at shielding us from the more distracting stuff, and we were working on a chronically understaffed, mission-critical, unglamorous, profitable product, so it sort of attracted "just do the work" types.

The OP, however, is a consultant, which brings a very different set of political considerations. Last time I did remote consulting, which was a long time ago, the biggest thing you had to worry about was budget.

Was the $2M project going to get $5M next year or $1M and why? If it's $5M you'd better be able to offer more services or they might push you out in favor of a bigger shop; if it's $1M you'd better make sure you have an internal champion to make sure you still get some of the work; and if you think you can't influence the decision you're not paying attention.

Back then, consultancies would have people on staff just to take all the meetings and drink the drinks and press the flesh and know these things. I'm talking about shops with maybe 10-20 people. I don't know how it works now, but I would bet tomorrow's lunch that whoever still has those people makes more money than whoever doesn't.

(I was a solo consultant, and my lunch was a lot more modest.)

I got a 35K raise recently - and all I did was ask - at my current job where 90% of the people are remote. The entire time I've been employed here, I've made sure to constantly mention to my manager how much I've improved things; that's what I mean by "sell your skills".

Basically from my experience, it's made no difference whether I'm in the office or working remotely; my value is recognized all the same.

EDIT: BTW I'm not a "Rockstar Dev" or any bullshit like that. My skill level is either on par or slightly lower than my colleagues. I just make sure to focus on solving tangible business problems and keep constant open communication with my team or stakeholders.

Training new employees (literally new graduates, but also new to team) can be more difficult with remotes. There are probably solutions, but having hired both remote and on-site employees, it was definitely easier to bring the on-site employees up to speed.

I fall into the "there's some value to co-located teams" camp, but I also believe that value is WAY overstated by most managers and senior leadership. In my perfect world, my team would all be located near enough to the office to come in when it makes sense, but free to work remote most of the time.

Given the choice between a traditional setting or remote, I much more prefer the remote session with those tools.

-- I'll admit to being biased towards remote but with an understanding many things do work better when together (physically).

1. White-boarding new systems/features. I find value in having the team in the same conference room and being able to use an actual whiteboard. So far, I haven't found a virtual whiteboard that was anywhere near as usable. I don't mean for pseudo-coding, but quickly sketching UIs or system architectures, where coworkers can walk up and edit each others work in real-time.

2. Onboarding new employees. Both for "water-cooler" socialization and ease of having the new team-member access other team member for whatever questions they have (Slack and other tools are most of the way there for the latter, but there's still something to be said for reading facial expressions and getting a "feel" for somebody).

And I freely admit some of that may just be my own biases. I've hired remotely and locally, both successfully, and with my company spread across 3+ continents, I'm used to remote collaboration.

I've worked with remote team-members for 20 years now. The tools today are light-years better. Heck, when I started at this company, many of the remote employees didn't even have stable internet connections - that was "fun".

Although tools like Google Docs actually replace whiteboards well for many purposes, I'm not sure why someone hasn't developed a better tablet-based collaborative tool. I admittedly haven't looked at what's out there recently but you'd think--even given admittedly limited surface area compared to an in-person whiteboard--someone could have given a better run at this.

#1 I'm curious what you've used & where it's come up short. I have had good luck there.

I find miro works well for this.

(1) Being the only remote person on a team. It was really hard to get other members to include me in meetings, etc. Perhaps your status as a consultant prevented such exclusion?

(2) Inability to stand at the same, physical whiteboard during technical discussions / design sessions.

Firstly, congrats! It's something I'm working towards myself, and the pandemic looks like it will be a significant opportunity to try and achieve it.

However, perhaps you're minimising your expertise here and the learnings and experience that the employer and the worker need to go through to make it work.

Anything to share here?

There are some cool studies about what a “valued employee” is, in a sincere sense, depending on remote v in person.

Remote - linkers, info sharers, result generators.

In-person - basically all the people<>people skills you’d expect get valued.

I’d love to find this study again, but it provided a nice framework for me to think through how to succeed based on the workplace type.

How did you develop clients with whom you've never worked in an office at all?

(I consulted many years ago, sometimes remote, but everyone wanted to see me come in eventually for meetings, so I'm very curious.)