When James, a 33-year-old senior management consultant, started a new job in late June, his new company sent him a laptop in the mail.

But while the laptop arrived, James couldn’t use it—he didn’t receive the dual authentication token he needed to log in, and a little more than two weeks into the job, he still hasn’t. He has to contact IT every two days to get a temporary passcode.

“In this day and age, if you can’t get into a computer, how can you work?” says James, who asked to be identified only by his first name due to privacy concerns.

James is among a number of Washingtonians who are navigating starting a job remotely, as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has kept many companies from returning to the office. These new employees are struggling to adapt to virtual work environments—making their first impressions via Zoom, trying to establish working relationships remotely, and dealing with video conferencing fatigue and tech glitches in workplaces they’re unaccustomed to.

James says his log-in problems have impacted his productivity in his first weeks on the job. “It’s been stressful, to be honest.”

Other locals have dealt with their own tech issues. While interviewing for a job over Zoom as the national press secretary for the Fairness Project, an organization that leads ballot initiatives on issues like healthcare and economic inequality, Roya Hegdahl’s audio started glitching.

“That was obviously a little bit annoying and distracting at the time, but they said I handled it very gracefully,” she says, laughing. “So, it didn’t interfere too much with the interview.”

The 26 year old had previously worked on Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign but was laid off in April when the Vermont senator ended his candidacy. She started at the Fairness Project in late May, and has gotten to know the staff through daily staff meetings on Zoom and one-on-one chats she set up with coworkers.

“It’s interesting to do that in such a formal way, too, because I feel like in an office setting, normally you’d be able to chat in the break room or go up to someone’s desk and just be like, ‘Oh, hey, I’m the new person in the office. How are you? It’s great to meet you,'” she says. “And you really can’t have any of those informal conversations. Everything’s a lot more planned and intentional.”

Overall, Hegdahl says her experience has been positive, and she feels fortunate to have a job and to be able to do it remotely, especially as the U.S. saw its highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression earlier this year.

“It’s not all perfect,” she says. “But I think we’re really lucky that technology allows us to do this at all.”

Others, however, feel there can be too much of a good thing. Gwen Shearman, a 30 year old from NoMa who started a new job at an SEO content strategist in May, quickly began suffering from Zoom fatigue.

Sherman says that sitting in front of a computer for hours-long Zoom meetings takes a particular toll. Small things, like taking a bathroom break, feel like a bigger deal, she says. “Like, ‘Hey, can we pause? Can I turn my camera off real quick so I can run to the bathroom?’ That happened to me,” she says.

After she started, as she began to meet her new coworkers virtually, she found the constant video calls draining. “I was like, ‘Dude, I need a break,'” she says, though she adds that the staff gave her a warm welcome.

“Not that people aren’t great to talk to,” she adds. “I love talking to anybody, but it’s kind of like, the awkward silences are much more apparent when you’re on a Zoom call than in person.”

She says the company, an Alexandria-based financial and investment advice business called the Motley Fool, was well-organized in its approach, which gave her more confidence starting a job in such unusual circumstances.

Widespread remote work for office employees has also created new requirements for job seekers and for companies looking to hire, says Karen Chopra, a D.C.-based career counselor.

Technical Zoom skills, from appropriate background lighting to knowing when to mute your microphone, have become “critical job-search skills,” Chopra says.

Once they have the job, Chopra recommends new employees set up individual calls (like Hegdahl and Shearman did) in an effort to get to know their coworkers, asking them about both their jobs and “basic personal questions.”

“There’s no meeting by the elevator, there’s no chit-chat before the staff meeting starts, so this is the only way [you’re] going to get to know people in the office,” she says. “And I think it really does help to have those one-on-one conversations.”

Chopra also says sending daily or weekly wrap-up emails to your boss can be helpful, letting them know what you did that and what you plan to do, and asking for feedback. However, the key, she says, is to be concise.

“Usually, especially remotely, the task is to over-communicate, and to touch base, touch base, and touch base,” she says. “The trick is to not do that in a way that overwhelms people.”

Chopra says starting a new job and working remotely works better for some employees than others. Those she calls “head-poppers,” who drop in unexpectedly on their staff or coworkers, may have a harder time, she says. “You can’t do a head pop,” she says. “Slack and some of these other communications tools say you can, but it’s different.”

Other Washingtonians have found another element of starting a new job tricky: making work friends. Malini Sen, 31, started as senior customer success manager at Socialive, a video enterprise company, in June, and says she misses “water-cooler chat.”

“I would definitely say that that’s been missing a little bit,” she says.

Part of that is a function of the video chat format. Even during the interview process, Sen noticed that with Zoom or Google Hangouts, there was uncertainty around knowing whether “a joke or a statement that you made landed well with the person that’s potentially going to be your boss,” which doesn’t happen as much in person.

However, she says her new coworkers have made an effort to be accessible. She has an assigned buddy who has filled her in on background about the company and other information.

She also has found that, in the absence of a physical break room, her coworkers are willing to chat casually online, whether via Zoom or Slack, whether sharing their feelings about a particular project or talking about what they made for dinner the night before.

Sen says that could be because people are working from home and “those lines are getting a little bit more blurred” or because the stress of all that’s going on in the world makes showing up in work-mode more difficult.

Still, she says she’s not yet as comfortable with them as she might be had she started in person. “It’s still a face behind a screen at the end of the day.”