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Comment by iamcasen | Hacker News Reader

As a founding engineer for a pandemic-era company, I can see both sides of this argument.

We've had a very challenging time hiring and maintaining teams across the company. People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack.

IMO Seed-stage teams should spend lots of time together so that trust and understanding is built in-person. Hiring should be done very carefully, and people should be onboarded again, in-person. Once trust is there, and good work flows are established, teams can go 100% remote, but I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year.

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I was a developer in a small startup many years ago, ~20 person company and ~8 developers. We were all in cubicles, everyone got to hear every conversation, and there were still a few people that either fell through the cracks or were listening to a different drummer.

In-person is no guarantee for trust and understanding, and in my opinion it obscures bad habits.

Remote workers falling through the cracks is wholly on the company and not on the remote worker. It takes a very concerted effort on the companies part, to ensure that everything is remote first.

None of the other things you mention (bonding, siloes, etc.) happen because a worker is remote. They happen because companies treat remote workers the same as in office workers, without putting in any effort to become a remote first company.

Indeed, it is on the company. My point is that it is hard to do this well at a fully remote and async company. Especially when collaboration needs to be tight and delivery needs to be quick.

Naturally, when in person, you sit with your team and you have opportunities to have lunch with people and get to know who they are. These opportunities don't work as well at remote companies. Especially with different timezones involved.

Not saying it can't be done, but I haven't found a way that isn't extremely contrived.

Videoconferencing is fatiguing as hell and is not at all the same as gathering in-person.

I think it is impossible to recreate the "small" bonding events that happen in-person, and I also think that many in-person events that are recreated virtually are (a) significantly less engaging and (b) easier to dip from.

That's me, though. Everyone is different. I also haven't experienced working at a 100% remote-first company, so I might not have experienced better alternatives yet.

I find in person meetings more fatiguing than zoom meetings.

In a zoom meeting, when the topic turns for my particular focus I can refocus myself either by getting up (wireless headphones) stretching, maybe nipping out on the porch and getting some fresh air or taking care of some other task on my computer without disrupting the meeting in any way.

In an in-person meeting, these things would be seen as rude and/or distracting.

This is less of a concern in both cases in 1:1 type meetings where the conversation is generally focused or it's easier to call a break.

> Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack

I would think that remote workers would be a forcing function for communications clarity.

Is there some deeper reason for this problem than "bad tools?" I see assertions that in-person is better somehow, but no reasons why that works better or why the same techniques can't apply to remote work. Is it all about pheromones or maybe some chemical sprinkled on the pizza?

I think the fidelity of unspoken information is so much higher in person. Over zoom and most certainly via text-based comms like slack, it's hard to tell if you are being understood, and if you are understanding.

Beyond just the technical understanding, then there is emotional understanding. I find that it's much easier to encounter apathy and malice over digital comms. In person, you have limited access to someone else's attention. On slack, you can be pestered by dozens of "very important" walls of text every day.

> People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen.

I don't fully disagree with you but this is also something to put some long, hard thought into by the C-level whoever is running the company, if it's something new, how to put in place the communication methods, chat groups, information sharing SOPs and such to prevent isolation from happening in the first place. Deal with it as a structural/business operation and methodology issue first.

Get the SOPs set up before you start adding more than a couple of team members.

100% agree, just left a highly functioning, high performance org that I led at one of the big tech companies and strongly feel this “bonding problem” is a feature of piss poor management. It’s not as easy, and it’s not the same, but running remote teams well means that you really don’t have people defecting every 15 minutes, accountability is high and (assuming compensation is fair) so is employee satisfaction.

A lot of these leaders are trying legislate away the impact of their unwillingness to evolve and adapt to a market that has fundamentally changed. Two of the tech giants I was at during the pandemic saw at least a 20% jump across the board in key productivity metrics and in some orgs as high as 30%. Other than Zoom/meeting fatigue and work/life issues that are pretty easily solved, it’s a win-win.

*unless your company has heavily invested in commercial real estate and you need to force employees back into it, to avoid losing a ton of value.

I think in this case, an established company with an established product and a mature org would do just fine in a remote setting.

I'm talking more about seed-stage startups and starting 100% remote companies from scratch. It's a whole different ballgame.

After iterating on this process for years now we just haven't found a solution that works.

Some orgs can do this through meticulous documentation (Amazon comes to mind), but that hasn't worked here. People have a hard time digesting huge volumes of textual information from multiple parties.

I tried this for a while, but no one would engage with my docs or collaborate with me that way.

So far the only thing that's been reliable has been regular zoom pairing sessions. But this too can be very exhausting unless you are in an IC role that has very clear directives (this doesn't really exist at seed-stage).

I don't think any of that has to do with WFH. It boils down to company culture. I've seen it all from small startups to large enterprises. The constant for great teams was just an open, trusting, collegial culture without a lot of top-down management.

When you inspire people, pay them well, and treat them like adults you would be surprised how much they go to bat for you.

This is true, bug again, how is the company culture formed in the first place? Was there ever a company culture that formed from fully remote individuals who never ever met in person even once?

I can't think of an example to be honest.

I very much agree with your point of view, but I've seen it go sideways when the culture is not well established and rooted deeply throughout the organization.

When you remove top-down management, pay well, and "treat people like adults" then they will have to autonomously align with the greater mission and purpose of the company and work quickly towards delivering positive outcomes for the business.

What I've seen happen instead, is people just start working on things that tickle their curiosity, wandering off into left field and the team is struggling to row in the same direction.

It is my belief, that in an office, or at least in a company that has an established culture, this is less of a problem. There are more mechanisms available to our innate human biology to reach a group homeostasis.

"I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year"

I'm curious why you think that and why such an arbitrary number? why not three or five times, or zero?

Zero: you cannot attach names to faces.

Three to five: starts to be problematic working around so many schedules.

Once or twice: you aim for two, you'll get at least one, and if 10/12 people show up each time, you'll get at least some of the benefits of working together with people you know well.

It's arbitrary, but it's practical.

From an end user's perspective: I am a doctor. I am the end-user for my specialty on my site that is the main point of contact for the backroom team in a different location that admins my electronic medical record. We have a once a month virtual meeting that is usually brief (15-20 minutes) to go over issues.

But I've met most of the people on the call at least once, when they traveled to my hospital to set it up. It helps to match name to face. And be able to recognize their voices. And if we were officially working together all the time, having a physical meeting once or twice a year would be a great chance for everyone to go out and grab a drink and learn how the others are personally. I'm not hypersocial, but even if you don't want to hang out with your coworkers (I usually don't), it's useful to have some interaction with them that isn't entirely business.

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