Regarding this remote work discussion. I myself work in IT operations, and I couldn’t imagine it without remote work. Lately, remote work has simply become the default. There’s no interest in going to the office unless there’s a meeting there, especially with management, as they are invariably at the office.
Then I noticed the discussion about tacit knowledge. Here, I believe that considering two things: 1) the typical personality type in IT operations, and 2) what working life has become in recent years, people are practically very isolated at home on Teams. A normal workday for anyone involves 4-16 meetings per day, a large portion of which are practically overlapping. This turns work into mere execution without any mental break.
It’s probably clear that in the aforementioned way, there are no social breaks, and you can’t just call a colleague when an idea strikes, because they are all tied up in their own Teams calls. The default is to schedule a new meeting with them, perhaps for next week. This way, tacit knowledge, or rather the entire company culture, gradually goes completely wrong. So, there’s no informal time with colleagues; with your supervisor, you work through things one-on-one, perhaps once a week; otherwise, in meetings, you figure out everything that needs to be done at any given time, and in the evenings, you do the actual work, because there’s no time to do work during the workday.
I believe there are others in the same boat? I often use production, for example a warehouse worker, as a contrasting example. Such a person cannot just grab a forklift and start haphazardly figuring out what to retrieve in a gigantic hall. They are protected both by the physical impossibility of doing five things simultaneously and by some kind of process that all warehouse workers follow. Well, in the IT sector, it’s completely the opposite: work management is miserable, tasks are consistently poorly defined, and most importantly, your calendar is arbitrarily controlled by everyone else but yourself.
