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With your Meta experience I am curious - would the people you had to talk to been in the office near you anyways, even if everyone was in office? It seems like with a huge global company the people who would be hard to get context from (so not the people you might have a video standup with daily or weekly) might be in a different office or building requiring a video call anyways

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Not everyone, but there would have been enough people around to have dramatically improved my experience. The problem there was Meta does not have a strong culture of documentation, and I didn't know what I didn't know. It was common to spend 2-3 days working on something only to find out on a random zoom call there was an entire team working on the same thing. Discoverability didn't exist. I found the environment untenable for doing anything of value.

At a large unnamed subsidiary of Microsoft, I saw four different teams working on a MSP solution. All of them crash and burned because each were run with 60+ engineers and not a single team talked to each other and they all reproduced the wheel (ignored federated systems and rolled their own)

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