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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. My current employer and the previous one had more than one branch, geographically located in different areas (and nations).

To me all the colleagues from other branches were "remote". As far as I can tell, it made no difference to me if they were in their office or at home, I still interacted with them via tickets, instant messaging, video calls etc.

And yet we all worked together.

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You missed my point. I didn't say remote doesn't work, I said remote will disadvantage remote employees if not done right.

I have experienced "remote not done right". I routinely felt and was in reality disadvantaged in that situation.

I am currently [back into the] same industry during COVID and am splitting time between WFH and the [pretty much] deserted office. I do not feel disadvantaged in this current situation.

I can tell you that the manager and the team makes an incredible difference.

I have a feeling a lot of people come at this from the perspective of small companies. In the case of large/global businesses, you may have teams that are largely co-located but you're probably on calls in the course of a given day with people on different continents. One of the main teams I work with, even if everyone were in the offices where they are technically located (or were) that would be two different although relatively nearby offices and another 6 time zones away.

Exactly this. Multinational companies are relaizing that they've already incurred the cost of distributed teams and that since there's really no difference between your manager being in Munich, Germany and Munich, North Dakota they may as well cut costs by allowing the latter case.

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