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Good points. If you were managing some 100% remote workers on your team, how would you go about compensating for the benefits you mentioned, so the in-office developers and the 100% remote developers gained as much of that benefit as possible?
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If going to office is not possible (you said 100% remote), I would try to introduce one or two weekly "informal" meetings of 15 to 30 minutes, so that people can catch up in personal matters and build a bit team feeling / keeping them "up to date" and in the most similar "wave length" as possible, despite the distance.
Additionally I would introduce some rules for the online meetings like:
- Connect the webcam but unmute the mic if you have nothing to say. This way you can still have some of the non verbal information in sight (although way more difficult to filter it up as the panels are too small to get all the details) but less interruptions due to background sounds or things like that. You can see if the people are "paying attention" or doing bullshit during the meeting (I know, people can disconnect the brain in presence meetings too). You trigger a bit that people gets dressed "properly" with activated cams, what for me is important too to activate the "working mode" in the brain...
For the people in presence if they all sit in the same room and there are people online....
- There is a "hand microphone" and only the one with it speaks, there is nothing worse that one micro in the middle of the table and people talking simultaneously. Use more webcams in the room, one directed to the group and one to possible analog mediums like flipcharts. At least one person paying attention to the online member list to see if there are questions in chat or hands up waiting for the opportunity to talk...
If I were a boss and I started with the hybrid constellation, I would very probably find other points to improve the experience with time and experience.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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MSBassSinger wrote: Being in-office ensures the person is working.
I can't recall seeing any company require back to work where it did not seem obvious that this was the reason.
They might do some hand waving about the rest of it but this is the reason.
Even more obvious when companies have been using an offshore workforce for years.
-----------------------------
This is somewhat similar to the claims that the 'open desk' policy where there are no offices, no cubes and even no assigned desk leads to 'creativity'.
In contrast the only study I have ever seen showed that actual offices (not cubes) lead to a measurable increase in work product.
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Don't underestimate the Power of Schadenfreude.
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Yes, for some. Requires discipline/work ethic.
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events.
- Manly P. Hall
Mark
Just another cog in the wheel
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I pretty much liked going to office to do my work. Way less distractions than I'd get at home. Also, I was a firmware engineer so I had quiet a bit of hardware I had to have to do my job (scopes, jtags, modems, TTY, etc). Heck, when my company went to the open office scheme I was able to keep my office because of the amount of hardware I need to do my job. Plus a fair amount of the equipment was noisy.
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I work with a group of 20 people in 3 main teams.
100% remote during COVID I only knew what 2 or 3 of my closer teammates was doing day to day.
We now work hybrid with an all-in-office or all-at-home approach. I prefer this approach.
There is a lot more spontaneous communication. You can peek in on a coworker and judge their level of concentration before you decide to interrupt them.
In-person discussions work a lot better than a laggy group video meeting. We plan discussion meetings for in-office days.
Since we can work remotely, people with the “sniffles” or even a low fever will self quarantine and work remotely. Work an extra day or two from home with a case of the sniffles and you can create a 4-5 day quarantine buffer with our current schedule, without losing productivity.
Pre-COVID, people with sniffles would choose to come into the office more often than not even though we had reasonable remote access available pre-COVID.
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englebart wrote: In-person discussions work a lot better than a laggy group video meeting
Do you think an employer that uses 100% remote, would be wise to ensure high speed Internet for their 100% remote workers? I had a couple of employers that did that, and it helped. Back in the late 1990s, the employer paid for ISDN, and later, some employers gave a fixed dollar stipend to help pay for high speed Internet at home. Of course, the employer had to beef up Internet speed in the office to handle the multiple remote connections used in meetings.
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We have very good connectivity in the office. There is a lag even with MB bandwidth. I am often on remote meetings where half the meeting attendees are sitting within ten feet of me so I hear the lag.
Improving the bandwidth will not relocate the servers managing the meeting.
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I see. So the communication is handled by internal network servers, not external/cloud services, then. I think you are right for your office's setup.
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englebart wrote: Pre-COVID, people with sniffles would choose to come into the office more often than not and pass the sniffles to the colleagues, from which some would actually get ill and be out for a couple of days
FTFY
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nice correction!
My team is pretty healthy, but a few of them take care of elderly parents at home. It can be the third and fourth jumps that feel the full impact.
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She's racking up AKAs.
She's a tiny adorable kitten, ginger girl (rare), loves car rides (rare), loves perching on shoulders (somewhat uncommon), and is otherwise an awesome cat.
She piddles on the bed. Not just on the bed, but on Himself while Himself is in the bed.
We have to lock her out of the bedroom. That's how she earned "Bette Midler the Bed Piddler". We're sending her to a behaviorist. I feel so silly about it but what can you do?
And she has an adorable supervillain alter ego, "The Nibbler" wherein she chews on everything in sight, beside herself in a frenzy of inchoate play-rage
This morning she bit my face. How rude!
Little monster.
Shedding on the fresh laundry (prior to being evicted from the room)[^]
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote: Shedding on the fresh laundry (prior to being evicted from the room)[^]
Now that's a cat who feels right at home. 
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raddevus wrote: Crank the playback speed to 1.5X. I listen to all my videos that way.
I've heard of some people who do that so frequently that they get impatient/irritated in face-to-face conversations to the point where they might snap at people, because they're sooooo slow, comparatively speaking, in making their point...
I can see some validity in that claim. I wouldn't go down that road, even if only because it just sounds so unnatural.
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Thank you for ruining an otherwise productive day  The guy is hilarious and, yes, I listened at normal speed - wanted to enjoy the talk but that didn't increase my productivity.
Mircea
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Re: COBOL. (I found the presenter "pompous").
The current crop of "best in class" languages still can't do a MOVE CORRESPONDING ("reflection" in .NET but you still have to write it).
Some still can't do a REDEFINES (of storage).
"RECORD" support ?
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I guessed that there would be some opposition from the COBOL literate among CP.
Yes, it is a bit pompous to judge any old tech since the people who created the original tech were working under constraints that the current generation of people couldn't even imagine.
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I actually enjoyed my time with Cobol, I've just finished a personal project in Cobol, it connects to a Postgresql datasource using embedded SQL(oceSQL) and generates reasonably good reports of my music collection, it was good fun to write and I'd forgotten how good Cobol is at text handling. Some people just love knocking languages. He was quite humorous though 
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yes, many tools used by craftsmen are often just not understood by the people who follow.
I do however, like how he takes all of the "worst of all languages" and piles them together to make his BS language. It serves nicely to point out the weaknesses that programmers have had to deal with.
Like dealing with NULL -- maybe in 2215 they will finally get rid of NULL and be like, "oh those idiots in the past with all their null!" 
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Mark's a mate. I shall pass on that you enjoyed it.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: Mark's a mate.
Very cool. He is really funny and I believe his British accent makes it a bit funnier for some reason (probably because I was an avid Monty Python viewer when I was younger).
Very cool way that he makes the BS language from all the broken pieces of numerous languages.
I especially liked the tab/spaced comment lines. Reminds me of Python* and use of whitespace. Ridiculous!!
*How many people out there have I angered now. 
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raddevus wrote: Crank the playback speed to 1.5X. I listen to all my videos that way.
I mostly do the same.
I also listen to podcasts at 1.8x, occasionally 2.0x, to the extent that when occasionally I start one at 1.0x it sound slowed down!
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