I've both hired and advised people hiring. This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant. The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You k

I've both hired and advised people hiring. This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant. The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You know, if we just had 1) better managers, 2) better specs, 3) better tools" We have been trying all of this for 30 years or so. At some point a reasonable person would look around and see that most all startups are colocated, physically in the same room having to deal with each other all day long. There are plenty of theories as to why this is true. Another observation: people not in the office do best at rote work: fix the bugs, align the images on the website, and so on. If your job could be done by robots -- if it required minimal interaction over electronic tools to get specs and deliver on them in an over-the-wall manner -- it will be done by robots. Creating technology is about people, not technology. You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving. Best-case scenario: you work on a tightly-knit team for a few weeks/months on a fixed-length job. Everybody gets into sync on the customer, specs, terminology, and solution. The customer's problem is not changing that much. You deliver some stuff as a team that people like. At that point, and not before, who cares where people are? Just get the work done. You can scale that out to working in BigCorp on a fixed domain, but only so much. And the scary thing is that there are no alarms that go off if you're doing it wrong. It's not impossible, or bad. But it works under very limited conditions. Understanding that is critical. I know there are a ton of folks who want to work remotely. I am one of them. But wanting something and looking realistically at what works or not are two different things.