I find game development extremely difficult to do remotely. I think so much of what *I* love about game development comes from weird side conversations and random collisions of ideas that it’s hard have any of that stuff when you’re not together in person. There’s way more time spent on communication overhead, you have to spec things out to much greater detail because of the time between conversations, and leadership’s job becomes much, much more difficult trying to keep folks on the same page and pointing in the same direction.

It’s *such* a difference that honestly, I don’t think I’d want to work in an all-remote all the time game development team. This may also be an indication that I’m not mentally flexible enough to be a leader in this new space, because in some ways, I don’t *want* to adapt to an all-remote environment.

That said, I’d never go back to an office full-time again *either*. And I’m not saying that because *I* don’t want to do full-remote that full-remote isn’t possible. Or that it can’t be as satisfying and effective. I’m just saying I don’t know how to do it, because so much of my experience has been with high degrees of contemporaneous interpersonal interaction.

But I think that in a post-COVID world, mandating full-time in-office work is incredibly shortsighted and stupid. It basically is leadership saying “Waaah, remote makes our jobs harder, so we’re going to make every single person on the team suffer to make our lives easier.”

There’s clearly an in-between that has to be more effective, more satisfying, and able to provide a better work-life balance than all-remote or all-in-person-all-the-time. I’m kind of glad I’m not the one navigating that space, but at the same time, if you’re mandating all-in-person-all-the-time, you’re going to lose a lot of talent, you’re going to have a hard time replacing that talent, and the team that stays is going to be less satisfied and less engaged than they could be. All because you couldn’t be bothered to navigate the way to that better future, and instead sat on your butt and demanded a return to an outdated status quo.

So yeah. If you’re one of those folks? Good luck. Your lunch is gonna get eaten by folks who are willing to put in the work to find a better balance for their team.