To me, as a eng manager in bigger company, seeing massive WFH while also hiring many new engineers over the last year, cultural concerns are around (note: this is not my balanced view on WFH, but rather replying specifically to cultural impact): - establishing true role models and context, i.e. when 2 colleagues call each other to talk about design challenges, what everyone else sees is the final outcome and not the thought process. New hires in particular miss this, as this is how they learn to think for themselves, and see who in the group is good for what type of discussions (ie someone is more looking to happy path, or edge cases, or testability or performance or operational readiness, etc). Yes, this in theory could be motivated by forcing always group discussions, but that's not how ad-hoc discussions usually happens naturally - Also from the previous example, outcome is not enough to judge who contributed how really (perhaps somebody had specific concerns around long term scale, tech dept, but was not captured in the outcome, which would manager know to appreciate, or someone may have rather aggressive tone in 1-1 deep tech discussions without realizing it, which you don't get a chance to hear). This has ripple effect on everything from everyday 1-1s and practical help/mentoring to ultimately performance evaluation. (Cultural values are ultimately about who do you promote, fire, and to some extent hire) - Having a hallway discussions and lunches/coffee breaks with people from a wider group, is to me crucial for getting context, anything from sparking new ideas, connecting the dots to hearing lessons learned on other people's work. With WFH you culturally need to be much more explicit on what and why do you want to talk about which missed the point. At the same time as newer, younger folks are coming to an office and go to lunch together, they start creating their own subculture and the whole experience of new company looks like bigger, much more prolonged internship work. They don't get to hear war stories, or context around why is company doing X and Y. - It's much harder to meet and know new people in peer teams, there is never time for explicit 1-1s with them, and meetings are always strict to agenda. Giving peer feedback is more focused on aspects that could be easily seen or measured (through email, code, meeting contributions) which could be good but also bad if not careful.

These are some examples that can degrade culture if missed for too long, so they definitely require more explicit actions from everyone.

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