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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but there are very real costs to having teams (at different levels) doing different things. A team with 8 people in-office and 2 people WFH is pretty crappy. The in-office people end up feeling put-upon to have to go out of the way to include the WFH people in things, and the WFH people inevitably end up feeling left out of a lot of things, because they are. At the very lowest level, it works best to have a single team all working the same way. At some level up the hierarchy it becomes more ok to have a mix; if five teams are collaborating, it doesn't matter so much whether two of them are in-office and the other three are WFH focused.

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> A team with 8 people in-office and 2 people WFH is pretty crappy.

It doesn't have to be crappy; I spent several years as one of the remote participants in a team like that, and it was one of the high points of my career. We made heavy use of instant messaging, and we met up in person for a week every quarter. People kept in touch well enough.

While I agree, it all depends on the methods of communication. In a more or less standard scenario, with a daily sync with video and then async like Slack, it doesn't matter that much who's in the office. I tend to message my colleagues on Slack even if they are sitting next to me, for the same reason that public channels are recommended over private ones - nobody is excluded and it's easy to find information that would otherwise be lost.

> with a daily sync with video and then async like Slack, it doesn't matter that much who's in the office

Unfortunately I think this is kind of a cope the remote people on the team use to feel ok about it (I've been that person quite a bit). But the people having coffee and lunch together more regularly just do form closer bonds and that matters. I don't think it matters as much as a lot of executives want everyone to believe it does, and I think remote work has giant benefits that aren't obviously or always or even usually overcome by "face time", but it's not not a real thing.

I personally believe some sort of bonding period is great for remote people. I've worked in a kind of "worst of both worlds" setup where I went to an office 8-5 but I worked with a completely remote team (the office was basically a place for me to put on a headset and ignore everyone else).

But we met on a planned company trip (with the excuse of a Vegas trade show, we went and met one week early) and that helped immensely with bonding and team building.

If I manage a remote team, I'll push for a similar team bonding exercise whenever possible.

Yep, this sort of bonding is very important IMO. But it's also a giant trade-off. I can bond with people I work locally with at lunch, I have to leave my children for a few days to bond with people I work remotely with. It's a much heavier burden. I think it is often worth it! The town I live in doesn't have offices for every interesting company in the world, so I have to compromise on who I can work for if I'm not willing to work remote, which I currently feel is an even heavier burden. But if my perfect job also had a local office, I would be very pleased!

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