My experience in a siloed company is that the information doesn’t “flow” to me, whether I’m physically present or not. Most of the “small talk” I get is distracting noise from unrelated departments whom I have no business with.

I’ve had no problems chatting and calling with people whom I have actual business with. And here I’ve had the most success with planned meetings and agendas.

My job is not to invent the next big thing.

I was going to say. Academia is relatively dispersed, compared to the few tech hubs around the world. Creative people will be creative wherever they are. And there are plenty of cool open-source projects, from k8s to jupyter, that have been built by dispersed teams.

The academia can handle this, because it focuses on long-term collaborations that may span decades. Your closest coworkers and the topics you work on don't change just because you got a new job and moved to another place. You continue working with the same people on the same topics, and there is an elaborate system of conferences, workshops, guest lectures, research visits, and sabbaticals that keeps the collaborations running.

I'm not sure how much of that is applicable to normal jobs where your employer owns your work.

In normal jobs, innovation and creativity are optimized away, and may even be seen as threats to status quo. There's little incentives as well, as you can get blamed and fired at any time. It usually doesn't go that far, but contracts often say company even owns your work in free time, so everything is set up against the employee to end up the way it does.

Academics heavily leverage in person meetings and conferences to exchange idea. Much of my conference time was spent chatting with colleagues rather than attending paper sessions. We don’t get that in a virtual conference setting.

doesn't have to be ground breaking research, could just be ideas for product iteration or for an employees own side project. Benefits individuals more than the company really

The way this benefits the company is that individuals are happy and create relationships with coworkers making work more enjoyable and making it harder to quit. Companies wants you to feel like a family so you'll stay for a lower salary or so you'll accept more grueling conditions.

Knowing this, from a company perspective, remote can work if individuals have a way to create relationships. In my experience, some people bond over work but most bond by spending time with each other doing friendly activities which are not work related.

An in-person party or a holiday is the best option but some online gaming is a decent substitute in these authoritarian times. Some people swear by virtual coffees rotations that randomly match people but I had a couple of good ones and dozens of cringy/weird. None of them ended up being positive for creating relationships, at best it was useful for knowing who is who.

"Companies wants you to feel like a family"> I strongly recommend everyone to browse through blind once a few weeks to dispel any such notion.

Gaming definitely helps. I've been playing through the Halo campaigns with a couple of my coworkers and it's been great.

I think it can be similar to having your company support slack channel open.. not necessarily subscribed but seeing the issues that customers come to your support staff with… that can provide surprising clarity… maybe product owners should be focused on that sort of thing and maybe this highlights issues with where I am…

At Spriggy we had senior developers enrolled into Intercom chat. This takes agile to a whole another level. I knew with certainty what we had to get done. It was not a jira ticket close but 100s of customers to help. Stressful, yes, but getting real problems solved, double yes.

Do you think that can scale to only half the real problems solved, but zero stress?

I think if you talk to customers with problems you are never going to have zero stress.

> Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.