I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.

What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.

Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.

maybe I'm just super used to it at this point but I don't really notice any friction in 1-1's. larger groups there's some (4+), but tbh it's not that much worse than the friction of that size in person

Havent noticed that even on international calls. But it might depend on the type of convo. Latency for talk seemed a problem last in the 2010s skype era. Latency in what is shown on a screenshare.... yeah! A problem.

Maybe it's because I have fiber at home with Wifi6 but I never experience this lag.

My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.

There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.

How is that different from just making a call? It's much faster and you can both be looking at your respective screens with the same information

One on one knowledge sharing is the worst kind though. I can’t search through your verbal conversations.

That's fair but there's something to be said of physically being around someone constantly and learning off of each other. It's how I learned vim, it's how I learned about neovim, it's how I learned about the majority of command line tools I use everyday.

That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.

If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.

I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.