Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions.

There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain.

What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.

a lot more than three years. remote work goes back decades before covid.

GitHub, Shopify, and Stripe all started as remote companies.

the really annoying thing is not the legions of people who believe it all started in 2020. the really annoying thing is that there's a ton of excellent literature on how to do it, and when it suddenly became mainstream in 2020, the newcomers ignored all that literature.

There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

I think the effects are going to start presenting now, but because it's a new phenomenon for most organizations, it won't be recognized for another year or so. The next 2-5 years are going to be littered with stories along the lines of 'progress ground to a halt and nobody could put their finger on why, so we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work and eventually realized it was a lack of any remote strategy'