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> The last friendly colleague relocated to the other town. Guess if we will meet again with 1,5 hours driving distance. It was nice relationship with 35 minutes driving, but now obviously it’s over.

Some of my old colleagues moved across the atlantic. We still keep in contact - one of whom I speak to daily. Have you tried contacting your friendly colleague or tried meeting up with them? 1.5h is not very far.

I have made many life long friends at work, who I am still friends with to this day, many years after we left the companies we both worked at. I'm sure many other people have too.

You need some kind of social bond with the people you work with. What are you going to do instead? Treat the people you work with like robots where every interaction is a barter or request of some kind like "Hi, can you review this please. Thanks." every single day for the entirety of your employment at this company?

Perhaps. I ended up going to a coworking space with this person for a day as the latency doing it remotely was just too high.

The single biggest issue I've noticed is that body language communicates a lot, and in remote environments you cannot see this. You don't feel at all invested in the other person either, and I've noticed people multi-tasking instead of listening to what the other person is telling them - often followed up with a "Sorry, I missed that. Can you repeat it?"

As another example, I've worked with some people who are quite confrontational and dare I say, aggressive, on camera, and have raised their voice a couple of times in the past. This same person has very different interactions in real life, a lot more empathy, where it becomes apparent the other person is in fact, an actual person with emotions.

Something I have been struggling with as a remote software engineer is 1. getting reviews from coworkers and 2. being able to communicate asynchronously with coworkers, even those working on the same projects. I find some of my coworkers are quite good, but others much less so. Sometimes I've waited 48 hours to hear back on a DM, and in other cases 3-4 weeks before getting reviews on PRs. It feels like in a remote environment it's so much easier to ignore other people that you work with.