I have been a part of remote teams for over 11 years of my career (16 yrs). I have worked from home more days than I can count. It has enough drawbacks that I'd avoid it at any given opportunity. Here are a few reasons:
- You are not part of the hallway conversations / decision changes / fly by meetings / face-memory / kitchen run ins and every other benefit of having people together. When your level is senior enough, these are very much a deciding factor in whether your last 6 months of work is going to be thrown out or kept relevant.
- Video conferencing is terrible. If you notice a pattern, the conversation is DOMINATED by the side with most power. I have seen very senior engineers (including myself I suppose) have trouble corralling a meeting / participating in a discussion that's going back and forth animatedly when there are other senior folk in one room. When you are junior, there is a high possibility your chances to speak are just perfunctory because almost all relevant points have been made already.
- Yes I have heard and tried the notions of ensuring meeting etiquette. I have also been part of these meetings where there is someone (or everyone) trying to police how the meeting is run (let everyone speak, juniors go first, go in a circle ...). Those have been considerably less productive to put it mildly. (Remember - I am the one who is remote).
- There are always mic-hogs who don't make a ton of points - most of the efficient places weed these out real quick. In a different rant - I hate optimizing for the bad actors that penalize the good actors heavily. Anyway - in this case you are left with few folks with real talking points not being able to convey the whole nuance.
- Essentially this leads to you doing extra work in ensuring at least some folks on the other side are on the same page before the meeting to ensure your points are considered.
So yes - in short remote is bad IMO. Video conferencing pretty much doesn't work since it doesn't capture the full presence and energy of folks. This is going to sound metaphysical, but my real presence is a million times better representation of the full me than my text/video :). It may work when everyone is remote with an individual screen - the usual situations I am in is where there are 2 or 3 conference rooms with people.
