> Videocalls. Whiteboarding. Interviewing. Strategic work. Reading emotions and connecting to people. What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done now takes eternities and every meeting is an energy hog.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time.
The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.
> FAANG companies - filtering candidates by asking tough LeetCode questions, which is understandable
Not sure that I agree it is understandable but I definitely am glad they make this bad decision. I dodged the bullet on interviewing with a FAANG and failing on one question (the recruiter told me it was the answer on a single question that kept me from getting an offer) after doing an onsite in SV.
I did not know what I was worth and would've felt compelled to accept an offer that would've been 30-50% less than I could command at the time and I would've had to move somewhere with 4-5x the cost of a home than where I live now. I didn't get that offer, and after a little bit more time I got an offer somewhere where I earn 2-3x as much as I originally said I was worth to the FAANG (based on places like glassdoor, etc.).
The culture is better, I can work wherever and whenever I want, and would have to go out of my way to not make impactful decisions that go to prod for millions of customers multiple times a week. It'd take 2-4x my base salary to get me to walk, which I could possibly command, but I don't feel any desire to look because I didn't fall into the FAANG trap and enter a cycle of pretending consultants selling quiz books know what software engineering is and jumping to be able to survive in SV.
I messed up something on a whiteboard with an apathetic interviewer about a special tree inversion or something - who gives a shit - and I have been extremely happy that happened every day since.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, you're doing it wrong. As a leader you should be adjusting to the dynamic that ensures meetings respect your teams' time, have clear outputs and follow-ups, etc. As someone who has been, and will continue to be, remote for many years in a leadership capacity, it's not the attendees of a meeting's fault if the person putting it on doesn't respect their time.
The reality of remote work being forced in the office crowd that I see is a reckoning of where mere presence was taken for value. I would never expect to get the best work out of someone by sticking them in a dungeon for a week. Let them walk in the sunshine with a headset, sit in the shade with their laptop, or take a breather to enjoy their own safe space while exploring new ideas.