You know, I wanna hate on big corpo breaking our balls about working on site juste because, but I gotta admit it's super difficult to have any *esprit de corps* without some physical presence. I'm one guy alone on a site, and the entire rest of the team is like a dozen people in Paris and it's tough. When people are not used to working online and communicating it's like they don't exist. You've no idea if they are indeed doing anything, sometimes, when for example their domain is not touching yours. I dunno but I can see how this is a big hassle when you're head of a team. Shit, my mate is exactly in this situation : he is the head of a team, and having worked with him, I know he's a great team leader. And he's been struggling in his new post for a whole goddamn year because it's a similar situation : he's the new lead but all the team is in Paris and he's not. They don't give a fuck what he says. So now they found a solution, he has to go there in person every fucking month. So yeah, I can see how you don't want everybody to be working remotely when he bothers to fly 500km just to show he is a real dude every month. But I think ultimately all it shows is how soulless it is to work at such a scale, and how it clearly impacts the final result. I don't know what size Keen games are, or Moon Studios, but those games are so fucking full of spirit. No way a big ass AAA can produce something like they do these days. They fucking wish, though.

That sounds awful. Do you think that's from being isolated from the rest of the team who are together?

My team is spread across three countries and we regularly worry about going to war with each other, and we don’t have that problem at all. Maybe it’s just your personality?

I'm super supportive of workmfrom home because I want to work from home myself, but I am also a bit of a manager and understand where these companies are coming from... I am a bit of a co-manager and the guy that I split my workload with I just feel like I get taken advantage of because because I have no idea what the fuck he even does most of the day working from home himself. It's sometimes really hard to keep track of what people are working on and how efficient they are doing it when you can't even tell if they just took the day off with pay or not.

I'm not sure why you got from all this that it was about me but okay.

Oh I guess you read "it's tough" as me being depressed of being alone while everybody else is having fun together in the other office? Shit, hahaha! That's sweet of you. But no it's not about me, it's about my managers having difficulties keeping our team together because it's split across France, and even the other site, *they* are mostly working remotely. There are like one or two people on site at one time, while a dozen of us work remotely from each other. Anyway my point is we still get the job done because we don't need to be a happy family, since we're just doing a soulless job. You can be a cave troll and still do Devops, nobody cares. One thing that everybody does agree on, though : it's much easier to work together on a project when you're sitting next to each other. It helps if you enjoy each other company, which we do. So some managers must think, well, we must force people to sit together in an office since it's positive. Which is completely stupid. It's like they don't understand human nature at all...

Investors have very big brains and are never wrong, so when a company drops staff they say it's good to see the company losing dead weight. Us stupid small-brained normies see a company struggling to have an original idea shaving staff to stay afloat and say "that doesn't look good". Then the big-brain investor loses money and posts on social media about how you can't win them all. The joke is that they didnt lose their money, they lost yours, because they were managing your pension fund.

We are supposed to work from home two days a week, but we must sign an agreement that it will be such and such day. Or we can have one single moving day. Can you smell the bullshit? In practice I never signed anything and we all do as we fucking please because fuck HR. So right now I'm in the office alone because it's great to have a big desk and good light with a beautiful sight on the countryside, and I get free heating. But yeah, we have a few contractors right now and we have no idea what they are doing or if they are useful at all. Which would be fine, except when we *do* get to see their work, it's usually all over the place in terms of quality and we often have to rewrite a lot of it. **But that's not an issue with remote**, that's an issue with managing people, I think. If they're shite at their job and we gave them one, we have to teach them to get better. Which is easier and more efficient on site, sure, but you can't really be sitting next to them checking their screen all day. At some point you gotta trust them and judge them on results.

> when you can't even tell if they just took the day off with pay or not But if the output of technical work isn't apparent in any way besides measuring indirect metrics like "hours of butt in seat", don't we have a much bigger problem?

Ubisoft at the office! Now! But,but, I wanna be hard! I wanna be hard at home! Not soft at work!

You said you struggled to have a sense of fellowship with your colleagues without a physical presence. This is not a problem other people have.

Companies being like "we doing soft layoffs"

On the one hand we can reduce traffic and the time people need to waste traveling to and from work. On the other hand, this guy can't keep track of his co-workers whose work has nothing to do with him. > all the team is in Paris and he's not. They don't give a fuck what he says. That's a leadership problem, not a remote work problem. You handle it remotely the same way you would in person.