> I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years and treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
See, this is dismissive. You're assuming something about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I have, and I'm trying to share that experience.
When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent, that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But the best things in my own career, without exception, have come from in-person relationships.
But just to add - it's a misconception to see remote work as a "new way" of working for someone like me. For someone like me, who used chatrooms and forums to collaborate with people on programming and similar projects, remote work is returning back to my natural way of doing things. Going to the office for 10 years was unnatural. We have now cut out a lot of overhead of learning how to manage office life, which is only relevant if you have an office, and which was a hard part of my life (I'm ugly).
And my experience is simply the opposite of yours. My strengths and my teammates strengths have only come to shine since going remote. I only became a Team Lead and then Engineering Manager since we've gone fully remote, and I think it is largely in part thanks to the speed and effectiveness my remote teams achieve in on-boarding members, collaborating, and delivering valuable work. Every retro my team members put "Great teamwork!" on the board, and this only started since we've gone remote.
> And my experience is simply the opposite of yours.
We keep talking past each other. This is the last reply I'm going to make, but hopefully it will add something: please consider that your experience is not opposite of mine, but instead, that you haven't run into the problems yet.
Maybe, for all of your success and advancement, you haven't yet reached the limits I'm talking about. Just consider it.
I'll also ask that you consider the possibility that you haven't experienced overcoming this limit yet. After all, what do we need to learn about our work that can't be represented as text
Or that this limit might be qualitatively different for different people, and that some people are better at online text-only relationships than face-to-face ones. Our teams may have faced limits in real life that only got solved by going remote. (For example, I do believe that when we were in person, we wrote lower quality software, less well-tested, with less communication and collaboration, at a much slower pace, than we do now (you can imagine why - likely we used to rely on informal processes more than we thought or wanted to))
I did mention that I've seen other teams (anecdotally, on less technical areas of the product) face problems with being fully remote- but that was usually fixed with staffing... or a remote leader inheriting the team... We've had many people in our org exclusively remote for the last 20 years as well - these people became the remote leaders on our teams and led by example. It all depends on the remote fit.
See, this is dismissive. You're assuming something about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I have, and I'm trying to share that experience.
When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent, that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But the best things in my own career, without exception, have come from in-person relationships.