Culture Is the Small Things
Before remote, engineering culture happened organically. The jokes in the kitchen. The spontaneous whiteboard session when someone got stuck. The celebratory lunch when a big release shipped. The gentle ribbing when someone's code caused an incident.
These moments weren't scheduled. They emerged from proximity. When proximity disappeared, so did the moments — unless we deliberately created space for them.
What We Lost (And Had to Recreate)
Spontaneous knowledge sharing: In an office, you overhear conversations. "Oh, you're working on the payment flow? I hit a weird edge case with that last month..." These accidental knowledge transfers disappeared completely.
Recreation: We created a #today-i-learned Slack channel. Low-pressure, high-signal sharing of interesting discoveries. It's not the same as overhearing, but it captures some of the serendipity.
Social bonding: The pub after work, the lunch conversations about weekend plans, the shared experience of the commute — all gone. Teams became purely transactional.
Recreation: Weekly optional social calls with no agenda. Games, quizzes, just chatting. Attendance wasn't mandatory, but regulars formed genuine connections. It felt forced at first; it became valued.
Visible celebrations: When a big feature shipped, we'd have cake. The whole team would gather, there'd be applause, the PM would say a few words. Remotely, achievements happened silently.
Recreation: Slack celebrations became more theatrical. GIFs, emoji reactions, @channel callouts for significant achievements. We made recognition louder because it needed to be to be heard at all.
The Rituals We Invented
Friday demos: Every Friday, anyone who wanted to could demo something they'd built that week. 5 minutes max, informal, no slides. It became a highlight of the week — people looked forward to showing their work and seeing what others had done.
Failure retrospectives: When things went wrong, we'd run blameless retrospectives. But we also started running occasional "interesting failure" sessions — sharing technical decisions that didn't work out, what we learned, what we'd do differently. Normalising failure made people more willing to take risks.
Virtual coffee roulette: A bot that randomly paired people across the engineering org for 15-minute coffee chats. No agenda, just connection. People met colleagues they'd never have interacted with otherwise.
What Didn't Work
Mandatory fun: Anything that felt forced backfired. When social events were optional, the people who showed up wanted to be there. When we tried making them expected, resentment built.
Over-communication: In the early days, we erred toward more updates, more check-ins, more visibility. It became noise. People started ignoring channels that were too active. We had to find the right signal-to-noise ratio.
Replicating the office: Attempts to create "virtual offices" with always-on video rooms felt surveillance-like rather than community-like. We stopped trying to replicate the office and started designing for remote specifically.
The Culture That Emerged
The culture that emerged from 2020 was different from what we had before — but not worse. It was more:
- ·Written: Ideas, decisions, and context were documented because they had to be
- ·Inclusive: Introverts and remote-friendly people thrived in ways they hadn't in an office-dominated culture
- ·Intentional: Nothing happened by accident; everything good was designed
We lost some spontaneity. We gained some intentionality. The tradeoff was worth understanding, not fighting.