>But whatever the choice, it has some consequences.
I think this is one reason you see some fairly strong pushback on the idea of a lot of permanent remoting. When everyone has a choice, those who want co-located teams actually don't really have a choice. I say this as someone on a very distributed team who has been on and off, more or less remote for about 15 years now. But if the rest of your team chooses to be remote, you can presumably choose to be in an office but you'll be mostly talking to people over video.
Agree, but it still has another side: when me and a number of co-workers choose to be mostly in the office, you get some form of discrimination. The people in the room get my full, almost undivided attention, while all remote people get a time share.
How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?
>How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?
Hopefully immediately on a distributed team. No one is going to keep you from having beers with your local buds. But making decisions while having beers with your local buds should absolutely be out of scope. That's how distributed teams operate.
Which comes back to my earlier comment. If half the team goes remote, the half of the team in the office can't just pretend those who aren't in the office don't exist. And management needs to take action if that happens. So, yeah, if a choice is given to not be in the office, that's going to/should affect you even if you're fine with going back to business as usual.
I think this is one reason you see some fairly strong pushback on the idea of a lot of permanent remoting. When everyone has a choice, those who want co-located teams actually don't really have a choice. I say this as someone on a very distributed team who has been on and off, more or less remote for about 15 years now. But if the rest of your team chooses to be remote, you can presumably choose to be in an office but you'll be mostly talking to people over video.