this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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I've been working remotely for over 10 years. Even without Zoom, it's never been a problem. I've met people and developed many relationships with just Slack. Heck I'm sure I'd manage that even with just email.
When I finally met everyone in person at the company retreat, everyone was super happy to know me in person. I was about exactly as they imagined.
Company culture is how you develop it. At every company I've worked with, I introduced social channels and established a continuous background chatter that's for people to share memes or whatever they want, to help establish a personnality that goes beyond "I just deployed X which puts project Y live on production". I have DMs with all sorts of people from all departments, just idle occasional chatter. It makes connections with other departments when you need their help. It works. I always somehow become the guy to reach out to for anything that doesn't necessarily fit a Jira ticket, or sometimes just need help making sure they file the right kind of ticket.
If it doesn't work, then either you have hermits that wouldn't be much more active in an office anyway, or the company is holding it back by discouraging or forbidding any sort of unprofessional or otherwise non-work related activity and the only way to socialize is in the break room in the office.
IMO idle chats on Slack are way less disruptive than in-person, it doesn't take you off your work stretch, you can send replies during Zoom meetings, you can even have textual side threads during a video meeting to go over details without holding the meeting for everyone. Sometimes I have hours long conversations going about projects on Slack, with everyone essentially just chiming in whenever they have new ideas or feedback. It gives people time to think and refine the specs without any "now or never" pressure.
Remote work works, if it doesn't work, it's a company culture problem not an office problem.
Honestly this so much. I'm not a forward enough person to be the one to create that background chatter in my workplace, but I will participate in it.
My last workplace had it and my current one doesn't, and the difference is night and day. Leaving my last company hit hard because among the developers we had such a great culture in spite of upper management's toxicity. I would leave my current role in a heartbeat because there's just no real culture. That's not something management should be aiming for, because higher churn is bad for the business.
Yeah, it really matters. It's the difference between a computer you turn on to do strictly business and a computer you turn on and look forward to engaging with other people and see what cool stuff people are working on. Look at people's delicious breakfasts and coffees in #breakfast, look at people's cats and dogs in #pets.
When done right, tools like Slack can also give you so much more visibility too and chime in. I'm a DevOps/platform engineer, but unless we talk secrets or implementation details we chat in a public channel so backend devs can see what we're doing. I can passively read the support team's channel and give them hints like oh this customer's CNAME points to the wrong site. I can see what the backend team runs into deploying their stuff and propose tooling changes to make their life better. It lets me be extremely proactive, without turning into a "you must keep up with everything everyone is doing". Half of them I have muted but still idle browse every now and then. I've had other teams pop on our public channel and ask details about how it works, so they can better understand how their code will run. I've had other devs chime in and say hey, our app works better in that kind of environment. It's a constant informal feedback loop on top of the usual formal Jira tickets. Saves everyone time, makes everyone happier.
It continuously reinforces the importance of my role, why my team do the things we do, who it's for. It's not soulless work anymore, because you know and see the impact of your work on other people. Even sales is less annoying because you can see them chat about how it's the 50th customer that asks if we can do X, instead of just hearing that sales sold feature X that we don't hace and now it's due next week, because you have context on why.