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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

You got it right at the end: "This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team." But this is not a remote/local issue. This is bad team organisation with crappy leadership. They could fail in the same way locally and it could work so much better remotely.

It's on your manager to fix it if your team can't communicate effectively or at all. You're letting them off the hook by thinking moving where you work would magically make things better without culture changes.

Source: Seeing my team every day. Talking with them immediately if they need help. We do group hangouts for current issues. I talk with them more than local team I worked with many years ago.

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There’s definitely a management problem, no doubt, but I’ve been in thriving teams before, despite poor management; we were all friends who shared the day in the same place together.

I’m in total agreement that remote work needs good management to be effective.

At this point its the "that wasn't real communism" argument. Is it possible to have a fully communicative remote environment with thriving culture and personal interactions? Probably. Does it happen? Not often.

Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.

>Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.

While I understand the motivation for this take I do not agree with it. You have to be intentional about supporting remote teams from the get go, which means you have to select for the skills that let those teams thrive when you're staffing them and especially their management chain. Expectations have to be clear, time needs to be protected from calendar pirates, outcomes need to be measured and accounted for, team members need to be able to talk to each other and management needs to keep reasonably close (but not oppressively so) tabs on team ops. It can absolutely work but it doesn't happen by accident.

That's just my point. So much stuff you get for free by being in the same room now has to be a deliberate, planned effort, and it's unclear if you even can get the same level of personal connection between people over Slack. And it just isn't happening at all the places I've seen.

For a ton of people and roles there's nothing really magical about being in an office. If you're any good at remote communications you can connect with people over Zoom, Slack or (ugh) Teams and form professional connections. Personal connections are a different animal.

It's very different. The "that wasn't real communism" argument is a thing because we've never seen one. For remote work, we have many examples of companies where it works and we've got examples of companies with terrible on-site culture.

"culture pretty much set themselves up in office" - that culture is sometimes avoidance, aggression, backstabbing. You have to work on the on-site culture as well if you want it to function well.

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