alt Hacker NewsI don't fully agree. If the only way information and cross-pollination is through in-office water-cooler conversation, that's an organizational smell.
If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.
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What other options are there? Confluence pages and public Slack channels or some sort of organized events? Its not even remotely the same..
It's not like there are that many natural opportunities to meet and interact with people you don't directly work with when everyone is remote.
Plenty of places are sub-optimal in organization (or some other aspect)… while still being functional and successful.
Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.
Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.