> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain"
This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged:
Why is it better?
Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up?
If so how often does this happen?
Why does this need arise?
If you have to clarify matters in personal conversations all the time doesn't that tell you that your company's processes and communication behaviour are lacking?
There are times when a face to face sorts out problems like nothing else, but there are a lot of people who value face-to-face over all else who are using those situations in bad faith. They know some social engineering tricks and they use little meetings as a stopgap for big deficiencies in other areas.
Developers are smart. You might con them into a bad idea in that 15 minute meeting, but someday they'll figure out they've been had. Most won't take it lying down.
In my experience, and talking to my peers, engineers don't come straight at you when they feel slighted. Especially if you're a big talker. They may not even gloat when they feel that the odds have been evened up. Not all 'bad luck' in companies is just bad luck. Some of it is work stoppage or malicious compliance by someone with a grievance who doesn't enjoy confrontation.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but being remote does not exclude having face to face meetings. There is (finally) easy and reliable technology that facilitates that very thing.
Highly diverse timezones can be a problem, but I've never know anybody working remotely to resist attending a relatively rare video conference call in order to quickly hash something out.
This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged:
Why is it better?
Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up?
If so how often does this happen?
Why does this need arise?
If you have to clarify matters in personal conversations all the time doesn't that tell you that your company's processes and communication behaviour are lacking?