An offsite is [in my experience] a dedicated series of days where a team comes together in one place (including from remote and satellite offices) to discuss strategy or other high importance problems together. Historically they were held "off site" (usually in someplace cool like a resort) Usually you have meeting(s) during the day and then there's a social activity in the afternoon or evening. Sometimes the location is someplace really desirable (Hawaii, Tahoe, etc) and you spend a few days alternating between focused meetings and fun activities.

Recently many companies are cutting back on the fun part of the offsites and holding them onsite or nearby the office to reduce costs. I've been to a few "on-site offsites" that were just in a different building than we normally sit in with light refreshments served afterwards. I imagine since Dropbox doesn't have much of an office presence anymore they probably still do destination offsites and fly people in.

Source: this is just something you learn working in tech in the bay area

I'm pretty sure Dropbox flies people in for these.

Thanks for the explanation. Jesus though, they're going to spend 10% of the year doing that? Maybe only part of the company? As an engineer I really can't imagine spending 30ish days of the year doing that. Must be just for upper management or something?

Assuming 4 weeks off for vacation, if you do one of them a quarter, each for a week, that's 8%. Close enough.

Yeah I'd much rather spend that extra week per quarter on vacation instead, and I'd probably get about as much done. My job just does not require 1 week of solid meetings per quarter.

What makes you think these are "solid meetings"?

Basically whatever they are, half meetings half forced vacation, I'd rather just have real vacation.

They can be none of that but regular work, just in person except you have the time to bind in person and decide (or not) to share time together after work.

My team is split across several countries, I don't need to see my teammates in person on a daily basis but I like to have the chance to see them once or twice a year and also tackle specific problems, run some workshop together during hackathons and participate in a teambuilding event.

The current company I'm working for, VC funded startup, does two company wide offsites per year, 5 days (one work week) each. Then another department wide offsite for another 5 days in another quarter, then the final quarter is a team-wide one that is up to each individual team to schedule and intended to last 4-5 days. So that tracks pretty closely.

TBH I feel like it's just a little much, but not much more than a little much. In other words, I think probably two weeks (10 full days) is probably a good minimum because I do see some value in seeing the team once or twice a year in person. So somewhere between 10-20 full days is probably the sweet spot for me.

More like 20-22 days or so if you are working 5 days a week, have around 25 days off + all the public holidays, which are about 4 weeks.

2 weeks every 6 months doesn't sound extraordinary to me. These are not vacation, these are regular work days. For an engineer I would imagine that would be what we call hackathons.

It's not 30 days typically, IME it's around a week or so, sometimes even just a few days. An off-site is typically also somewhere pleasurable.

It's also usually a huge, ridiculous cost to the company. A few companies ago they spent a million or so sending us 200 employees to an island. It would have been cool if it hadn't been immediately followed by layoffs citing cash burn being too high.

You're misunderstanding, they'll pay for your flights to the "off-sites", which are mostly team building hangouts.

Yes this sounds like the best of both worlds tbh. Id like to find a list of companies which have this.

Mostly fully remote companies will have something where everyone gets together at least once a year.

Not sure what their version is, but at my employer (Canonical) we are globally remote in >70 countries accross all timezones. (Almost) everyone works from home, but everyone gets together in very large events for 2-4 weeks per year. The company flies everyone to an always changing location to meet at a hotel with many many meeting rooms for the week. The company pays for flights, accomodation, meals, etc. It's a short trip for some and a much longer trip for others like me being in Australia :)

The main part of the working week is a fairly dense schedule of both inter-team and cross-team meetings. You can get everyone together from all teams in the same timezone for various meetings, discussions or even pairing sessions to work together on things for the week. We plan and make decisions to set the pace and direction for the next 3-6 months of work remote.

While this definitely differs from person to person, for many it also functions very well as a great way to meet your colleagues face to face, especially for those out of your timezones. Many will have social dinners in various groups, a team dinner, head out for some sight seeing during the week or weekend before/after, etc. The location we travel to is always changing so you get a little taste of travelling to many different places and you can easily tack on a couple of days holiday before/after, etc.

It's a big part of what has made working remote here great for me. I've worked remote since 2007 when I joined MySQL, it was a similar travel setup at MySQL but once we got acquired by Sun and later Oracle for various reasons including the GFC such travel stopped and I never saw my colleagues face to face. In my particular team at that time we also never really used webcam chat etc so it was quite isolating - pretty much everything was done on Chat. It was a refreshing change moving here and getting to travel and see people, as well as chat on video a few times a week.

It definitely has it's challenges, especially for those with families. A subset of people travel for 2 weeks at a time and even the 1 week at a time (twice a year) that everyone does can be challenging for those with families. However I personally contrast that with the fact I have 0 commute time every other day of the year - easily saving me the 0.5-2 hours per day travel time that is pretty common at least in Australia (or more, I have gotten many stories of 3+ hours travel time from candidates in India). This leaves me with a lot more time with my young kids and family every day. I see them at both ends of every day - no leaving before people are awake or getting home when they are in bed already. Assuming 1 hour travel per day that would I guess equate to ~11 days a year saved not travelling? So kindof roughs out I guess - though I had never done that calculation until just now.