Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

Not trying to start a big debate over the whole issue, but just sharing that I felt very similarly to you ("massively affecting my mental health") and that it was solved by doing the obvious: going back to the office.

No amount of socializing outside of work or hobbies or 1:1s during the workday sufficed for me.

For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.

Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8

It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.

Async work can, and often should, happen in the office is well. Synchronous work is often required in remote work.

A big stumbling block for remote work is the belief that remote means you shouldn’t have to interact with other people much. Some people like that idea, while for others it’s a big problem. Juniors especially struggle when their contact with other team members is forcibly reduced to narrow windows or very delayed responses to everything. Juniors shouldn’t be reaching for help at the first signs of struggle, of course, but some of the async work zealots push the concept so far that juniors are expected to be almost solo developers.

As someone who has successfully worked remote for years, I worry about all of these ideologic prescriptions for how remote work must look. Most of the remote work failures and return to office mandates I’ve heard about in local companies have their roots in unrealistic ideas about remote work, both from the company side and the employee side. Having done this for years I think it’s important that people are still available for ad-hoc collaboration and conversation in company chat, within reason. Remote fails quickly when people take it as an invitation to isolate themselves and check e-mail or Slack once or twice per day.

The only exceptions might be work that is highly repetitive and truly isolated, like an employee who can take an endless queue of similar tickets from Jira and do isolated work on the same tasks over and over again. Most engineering R&D work doesn’t look this isolated, though, so the model fails when forced on more traditional software development.

I’ve also experienced the opposite extreme, where managers go remote and feel obligated to schedule meetings all day long. I had a short-lived remote job where my calendar was over 50% recurring meetings before even scheduling time to discuss work with peers that week. Predictably, nothing got done at that company and they are reluctant to let anyone work remote now.

Not that those were great, by they are incredibly prevalent in an office setting and there was never enough industry wide pushback to these interruptions to really put a dent in them. Remote work has allowed workers to put some boundaries up around this and made their "tax" much easier to feel and quantify by workers in general.

This is where I have found in a nut shell is why communication breaks down without re-wiring it from the ground up and ingraining the new remote work into the culture of the company. You can't just lift and shift the methods from one modality to the other

You can solve this, and many organizations have. It does mean re-thinking expectations around onboarding and the role of mentorship in the company though