Two complaints that are not real

The first: "remote turns every thirty-second question into a scheduled meeting." No, it does not. That question is a Slack message or a mail, and it should be, even in an office. Interrupting someone's focus to ask a thing that can wait an hour is the bad habit. Asynchronous-by-default, with clear response expectations, is one of the things remote does better. I have written about how that works in the focus-time post.

The second: "you lose all the ambient awareness, nothing reaches you by osmosis any more." Also solvable, and we solved it. A persistent spatial tool, gather.town in our case, gives you the ambient sense of who is around and approachable, and the spontaneous drop-by, without anyone scheduling anything.

With those out of the way, here is what actually sucks.

Everything happens in the same rectangle

In an office, context is spatial. You stand up and walk to a different room to have a meeting, to the kitchen to take a break, somewhere with other people to celebrate, and out the door to go home. The change of place is the change of mode. Remote deletes all of that. The meeting, the break, the celebration, and the work all happen in the same chair, looking at the same webcam, often straight after the same thirty back-to-back calls. The mode never actually changes, and that does something to you over time.

Celebrations are where I feel it most. You ship something big. In an office you would stop, there would be cake, people would stand around for half an hour and it would feel like something happened. Remote, everyone is in a different timezone, the "celebration" is one more video call on a day already made of them, and the work you are celebrating is one browser tab away the entire time. It does not land.

Social events have the same problem, at least for me. Social, for me, is what happens outside the office room. A scheduled "virtual social" in the same rectangle where I just finished a day of meetings is not an escape from the rectangle. It is more rectangle. I know it works for some people and I am glad it does. It does not work for me, and I have stopped pretending it should.

I do not have a fix for this one, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. A themed Zoom background does not change it.

The things that need a room

The second category is work that goes worse remote, and better software does not fix it. Being on-site for those specific things does.

Reading the room is the first. You cannot pick up the ambient mood the way you do when you share a space, who is quietly miserable, who has half-checked-out, who is about to leave. This one can be mitigated. The signal still reaches you through the people you stay in close contact with, a good head of engineering, your engineering managers, the individual contributors you have a real relationship with. That is exactly the close contact a few levels down that I argued for in hierarchy exists. You just have to build the channel on purpose instead of getting it for free.

Hard conversations are worse over video, and this one splits in two. The heavy conversations you can plan, a difficult restructuring, a deep disagreement, should happen on-site even in a remote-first company. Get in a room, and take a walk afterwards; video cannot give you either. But not every hard conversation is plannable. An escalation blows up at six in the evening, you have to let someone go on short notice, and those happen over video whether you like it or not. That residue sucks, and no tool I have used makes it meaningfully better.

Complex collaborative thinking is the third. No virtual whiteboard I have ever used comes close to a real whiteboard with a few people standing at it. For hard design work, stop trying to make the tool work and get everyone in a room for a day. I have unblocked more than one problem that way after weeks of it grinding remotely.

Summary

Most complaints about remote are either solved or were never real. What actually sucks is that remote collapses celebration, break, and work into one rectangle, and I have no fix for the social loss that comes with it. Unplanned hard conversations and complex design work go better in a room, so go to a room for those. Stay remote-first, because it works for most of what a company does. Just do not pretend it is free.