I could honestly see this being the future of remote working, you still want face-to-face time, here you have it. Want to sit next to people in an "office" you can do it all virtually now. Of course you will need to add in the ability to draw on a whiteboard that's also rendered virtually, and a water cooler in the corner.
If my manager/boss told me I had to use some shitty headset from the cancerous entity that is Meta (ignoring that this also means that Meta will now have full body scans of people, as if that's not the worst idea on earth) to be in VR with my colleagues for my useless morning standups I'd quit on the spot and go do something more fulfilling with my life, for example chewing on gravel and sand.
Not willingly? Too many, I unfortunately have to work with Meta's horrifically terrible APIs and every time an issue crops up related to their APIs (nearly daily) I say a silent prayer for that company to disintegrate into nothingness.
Willingly, basically none, or as few as I can realistically manage. I don't have a smartphone other than a burner one with GrapheneOS for my bank app, run linux on everything else and my work MacBook sits idly in the corner somewhere with 0 battery in it despite protesting from my manager.
Well, except the fact that you lose out on spontaneous meeting points like someone heading to the kitchen while you're heading somewhere else and suddenly one of you remembers this one thing and a conversation happens in the hallway.
Bell Labs is a famous example where it seems to have played a role (together with the people working there of course, and other variables).
> But just as important was the culture of collaboration that the company fostered. The leaders of Bell Labs understood that physical proximity could spark innovation, and they designed its facilities to bring experts together in both deliberate and unexpected ways.
> At Bell Labs’ headquarters complex in suburban Murray Hill, New Jersey, all of the laboratory spaces connected to a single, vast corridor, longer than two football fields. Great minds were bound to cross paths there, leading inevitably to spontaneous and meaningful interactions. As author Jon Gertner writes in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” Throughout the labs, employees were instructed to work with their doors open, the better to promote the free flow of ideas.
Nope. Mark your coffee breaks in software like you do in Slack, then your avatar can just be standing in the coffee room or company cafe and people will be jogged there.
It's exactly the same. You can have the avatars doing anything you want, there is no difference.
Want them to do a pass by every desk in the office when they go to the kitchen, or bathroom? Possible. Want to turn that option off to get down to work? Possible.
Guess it depends on what you think is frequently, maybe once or twice a year when working in a office setting. Always happened at small companies, and usually what was sparked in the conversation had a big impact on what the company worked on.
So for the off chance that once in 6 months you have a conversation in person that "sparks something" everyone has to suffer commutes and all the other crap that comes with WFO?
No, I think people should be able to make a choice between working in a office vs working remote, which considering how many jobs are remote nowadays, you can kind of already do.
I'm not saying all companies should work in a office, I'm just sharing my viewpoint from someone who prefers in office compared to remotely.
The biggest problem with remote communication isn't presence. It's latency. You really feel it when you have those situations where people constantly talk over each other.
