It really depends on a lot of factors. For somebody who's shy / socially awkward / introvert (lots of those in tech) it's _a lot_ easier asking questions in chat than in person, especially a shared chat with not too many people, it's also way faster than walking across the hallway to catch the person that you need.

In my experience coaching many young engineers in person and remote, the problem is not so much that it's easier for them to ask questions, is that they don't ask questions, like, at all. They are too worried to sound/appear dumb, even when all the senior/staff engineers are super nice. And in a way I understand that, they are unproven, they have to show their worth to everyone else.

My theory is that the idea that early career people don't do well remote is that it's easier for the senior people to forget about them and not check up on them regularly to make sure they're progressing. If a person is sitting close to you and not making progress it's a lot harder to miss. Also the casual "hey everything OK with your problem?" is a lot easier in person than online. That being said, with some adjustments it really doesn't take too much effort on the Tl/Manager side to make sure junior folks don't get stuck.

I've lead a few teams remotely now and the most successful ones were the ones where I started checking up on the most junior ones often, as often as every day, just asking low-key questions like "hey do you have any questions for me? are you stuck anywhere?" for a bit, just to make sure they were feeling OK asking me when they had a problem, and re-routing them to the right person as needed. After a while they feel safe and start doing it on their own, but it might take a while depending on the person.

As an experienced person, I can chat with anybody at the company within minutes, it's so much more productive than chasing somebody in the office (which could be easily 10~20min walk away).

In person is way better for socializing, creating team bonds, etc. but you don't need that every day, a yearly/quarterly team/company offsite is sufficient.

This is my perspective working at companies that are big enough that they would be global anyway. For a smaller company I can see the argument of having everyone in the same office, but even then your giving up a lot to make up for that (commuting, walking around finding the right person) and I don't think that scales well beyond the 1000 people mark.

> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.

Okay, sure. But why does this need to happen in the workplace?

And more importantly, why are you advocating for employers to unilaterally declare that this needs to happen in the workplace?

> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.

No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to be created young workers that don't know any better. If you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can forge working/professional relationships virtually just as well, if you put the effort in.

Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is just that we make too many blanket statements. What works for you might not work for me, and these organizations trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end. You can have co-existence, especially in a company the size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office presence and remote presence.

> Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"?

I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and I was in an area with supposedly great access to public transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about their workers' best interests they would do more to help invest in and lobby local governments to support public transportation.

> And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.

If you were hired with the expectation to come into the office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people were hired with the promise of being able to work remote, so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad situation.

In general this animosity between office work and remote work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-exist.

I've worked with people (remotely) in the past that I'll still hop on Discord and play video games with.

Working remote lets me make connections and friendships where I live, and have more time to do so than when I was spending hours each day commuting.

I totally get that, but it’s important to look who’s providing the information. I highly doubt the analysis was independent of bias.

We know many companies want to push for back to office work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard…

Some food for thought.

This is really not a matter of sample size.

If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will need to think about sampling, be careful about what you test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you don't know.

Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a huge company messing with the lives of many people and claiming they know exactly what they are doing.

Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.