One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it, so everybody was rehearsing the architecture in their heads and had a basic grasp of it. It was like a tribe singing the same songs over and over again, trying out variations and evolving the “official” version over time.
This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. Best case, someone shows up with a diagram, and it stays up while people talk about different ways of doing it, and after the meeting someone makes the changes that were suggested.
It really lacks the collaborative value of someone walking up to the whiteboard and saying “what if we did this,” not hesitating to make changes because they can do it in ten seconds and then wipe out their changes and redraw the original in few seconds if they want.
When somebody starts making changes to a diagram in a remote meeting, it’s a sign you’re going to be there for a long, long time.