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Distributed teams are where it's at. There is no need to make your most experienced people with the deepest knowledge (often the married people with children) g
by wyclif 11y ago
Distributed teams are where it's at. There is no need to make your most experienced people with the deepest knowledge (often the married people with children) go through all the drama and hot mess that is the Bay region. The taxes. Finding an apartment (or house!). Finding a school for your kids. The cost of living. Parking. The NIMBYism, political correctness, and hatred of engineers a la the Google Bus. The overhead of homelessness, and the aroma of shit and piss on the street.
At some point, companies are going to have to get with the program if they want to keep their best people. That will happen once enough of them can't fill senior roles. They'll respond to quality of life issues—those are getting more important in hiring, not less. You don't need to locate your engineering team in SF and force them to put up with all that bullshit. Make life easier for them, not harder.
- hugh4 11y agoI wonder if there's good ways to connect your offices via connections in physical locations, always on. I envisage a whole wall that's a screen with a camera, acting like a portal to a different office location. Stick it in a corridor or a tearoom, a common area where people can just encounter one another at random and chat. If you want to have an in-depth talk with someone at another office, send them a message asking to meet at one of the portal locations rather than scheduling a Skype session. Encourage people to meet and introduce themselves to people they happen to see through the portal. Does anyone do this kind of thing?
- jon-wood 11y agoAtlassian did exactly that, scattering large displays with a permanent audio/video link to an equivalent in another office around their hallways.
- crazysim 11y agoWould you happen to know what software setup they have for this?
- mondo 11y agoWhere I work it has been done with Google Chrome Boxes. It's a video conferencing platform for Hangouts.
- JBlue42 11y agoWe have someone working remotely through Hangouts. Unfortunately, he has to reconnect a few times a day because the call quality drops after a couple hours. Have you experienced similar?
- swampthinker 11y agoMy friends and I often use Teamspeak when gaming and general socializing. It's very much like sitting down in a room and being able to talk to everyone. I wonder if there is a professional market for this? Something like a Slack for audio.
- WalterBright 11y agoI've worked off and on remotely for decades. Most day to day work can be handled adequately by email and Skype. What's missing are the camaraderie you get from going out to lunch with colleagues, bull sessions, friendships, etc., which are important for building a team.
- ljosa 11y agoThere's Slack for that.
- 67726e 11y agoSlack really doesn't cut it for team building and building camaraderie. Where I work we're fully remote and the difference between Slack and actually getting together in a beach house for a week and collaborating is not at all comparable for the boost of morale.
- lsaferite 11y agoThat's why you take periodic trips to meet with everyone. For a partially distributed company you just come to the office 2-4 times a year. For fully distributed companies, you plan company wide events a few times a year to allow that face to face.
- 15155 11y agoThe Bay area is often a losing proposition, financially, for engineering talent. Taxes, housing, general expenses are all outrageous and do not often come with commensurate salary increases. I personally will not move anywhere in CA due to a few of the things you've listed (NIMBYs, PC, CA political climate in general.) Venture capital is about the only thing SF has that can't be found elsewhere.