Elon Musk may be right about ending remote work
s-a-i.medium.com
s-a-i.medium.com
If anything I'd say its likely that really embracing remote work instead of half-assing it would probably improve onboarding for most companies since you'd assume the situation would at least cause a smart company to produce a clear and standardized process, instead of leaving it mostly to fate which is how onboarding has historically been done in-office at a LOT of tech companies pre-COVID.
As a counter anecdote to the one presented in the blog post: the game company Bungie shipped 2 major game releases (with a third arriving in Feb) for Destiny 2 and are working on at least 2 unknown new games while expanding the company by hundreds of employees during COVID. Earlier this year as many companies began to issue Return to Office mandates they announced they will be shifting to "Digital-First" and expanding the amount of fully remote job hires. They've absolutely thrived in an industry where both highly technical and creative workforces are required despite a huge shift to remote work (and were acquired by Sony for 3.6 billion dollars earlier this year).
> Do I have to schedule meetings for discussions or are employees expected to be online at all times? At an earlier consulting role, I had given my team a single Google Meet link where everyone was expected to hang out at all times when they were not doing deep work. This idea became so popular that the link eventually got a nickname and other teams knew to just pop in to ask questions. This link truly was a virtual office for the team.
This sounds like a nightmare. The only takeaway I got from this article is to avoid any company that the OP has consulted for.
Also, did you miss the part where teammates were expected to be online while NOT engaged in deep work? They were simply expected to be online, not online AND engaged in team building chit-chat. There is something to be said about being stuck in a system review and having the option to quickly ask a teammate a question.
If you have recently started a role which requires collaboration in a remote-first company and have not face any ramp-up issues while also not having had to invest in getting to know your peers and systems, I'd love to know more.
My suspicion is that if this has happened with you, the team you joined had a superior on-boarding process to the one my friend experienced.