I think we are going to agree to disagree on some things, but I understand that I am a professional weirdo when it comes to the WFH/RTO battle. I'm a child-free late-30s guy who has always loved commuting (traffic and all) and working away from home and treats the airport, airplane cabin and hotel room in some other city as a collective happy place.
> As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
I was a cloud/DevOps consultant/SA as well before I moved into tech presales. It's a different world, even though it doesn't seem like it would be on paper.
Delivery can be (and usually is, these days) done remotely, but I've found that finding new opportunities to expand or sell into new parts of business is easier when done face to face. The human part of the job is difficult to replicate over Zoom, in my experience.
That said, when I was a consultant/SA, I much preferred pairing with clients in person than over Zoom. I enjoyed the travel and found sharing a keyboard to be more engaging than talking at a screen for hours on end. I realize that this was probably a "me" thing and that others are totally fine with remote pairing.
> My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
This is where we differ. I'm at my best when I'm working with others in-person towards a common goal. While I'm also motivated by money and am not pining to make lifelong friends in the workplace, I miss going to the bar at the end of a long week and decompressing with others who "get it." My wife has this, and I'm always jealous about it. For me, doing this over Zoom pales in comparison.
However, all of this is why I prefer hybrid arrangements that are mostly remote with budget for monthly team get-togethers. I don't think being on-site every day is effective, but I've found being perma-remote to be really isolating.
> ’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
These are excellent systems _if you are a self-starter and know what you're doing_. They fall apart if you are junior that develops best in a dedicated environment, or if you prefer a more "social" way of onboarding.