The worst thing about remote work IMO is that it can make the default social interaction "two people, in a room, alone, that the rest of the team can't see."

In an office if two people -- or a subset of the team -- were going off and having a lot of meetings solo the rest of the team would at least see that this was happening.

Conversations in a private 1:1 space can also get really personal, really fast.

I have been in a couple of situations where someone was able to regularly get me alone and then take the conversation places that basically never came up at the office.

@nat The really great practice of having high bandwidth conversations really backfired on Labs for engagements during the pandemic. When collocated, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but this was such a pain during remote engagements since Labs was honestly just pretty terrible at using Slack.

@alpha What kinds of things happened?

Pairs making decisions without ambient info from the rest of the team? Or other things?

@nat I found the more annoying thing to be that ambient info didn’t get, well, ambient-ed. It took much longer for small knowledge to be disseminated across the entire team since it had to traverse the network through individual edges rather than via hub-and-spoke (where the hub is usually Slack). You could pretty reasonably rely on team collocation to naturally take care of this in the normal Labs setting.

Also a more subtle difference is that on my remote engagements, the team never got as gelled as with at-Labs work. I attribute it to the same cause, that Labs practitioners generally didn’t have the experience or muscle memory of chat taking the place of in-person communication.