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Comment by rewma | Hacker News Reader

> Ditto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps (...)

I'm sure mileages vary, but between wasting a significant portion of my life commutting to be able to experience water cooler talks, and hugging my wife and children once I step out of my home office, you can keep all the water coolers in the world to yourself.

Work/life balance shouldn't fall all the way to the work side of the scale just because some managers struggle with remote work.

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I agree. I’m speaking personally. I cut out a three hour commute and I’m never going back, but I lead a team of twelve people and it’s important to me that I also care about their lives and careers, helping them advance and grow is important to me beyond my current company because I hope to work with them again no matter where. To that end, trying to think of ways to improve their professional growth on the remote world is important. The week in the office is something I think leadership should do, I see almost no reason for ICs, except for onboarding/cross team socializing which can be done other ways too, just more work these days :)

Totally agree. I've been getting up to speed just fine at my new and (at least for now) fully remote job.

If you're struggling to fill the gaps or onboard people at a certain point you have to admit to either managerial or organizational failure to adapt. It's called taking responsibility

Just out of curiosity, how large of a company/companies have you been working for?

I’m asking because my experience is largely with <200 people companies (more so with <50) and onboarding and such is always very scant at startup stage and only starts to happen in my experience at stages of intense growth and post series C/D, but I may be in a weird niche.

These things also tend to happen organically at different stages depending on the team but don’t become mandated/invested in until later.

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