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I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on seve

by vonnik 10y ago

I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents. While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how things work and how people relate to each other is much higher. In addition, the bandwidth of the non-verbal and paraverbal information is much richer. People working remotely forego most of that information, and their understanding of the org and its culture is diminished. So why do we have a distributed team? Because we hire the top contributors to our open-source project without imposing a geographic filter, and it's the best, most efficient way we've found to build a really strong engineering team. We're aware of the shortcomings of how information flows, and struggle constantly to improve how we communicate.

throwaway5752 10y ago
Left my work computer to go to my personal computer only to reply and upvote your comment. I have worked for and managed teams in both shared office and remote companies. I could hardly say what you said any better myself. I think the nature of what companies are best fits for remote work, and how best to mitigate the loss of passive information sharing/lower bandwidth of subtle communication cues would be a great subject for a book or article. My short version would be: it primarily solves a recruiting problem in extremely difficult to recruit for fields, takes advantage of a bit of arbitrage in some people's utility of remote work (introvert, commute, family, etc), and information needs to be overshared (more meetings than one might prefer, more documentation, more explicit processes, etc).

by vonnik 10y ago

throwaway5752 10y ago

Left my work computer to go to my personal computer only to reply and upvote your comment. I have worked for and managed teams in both shared office and remote companies. I could hardly say what you said any better myself. I think the nature of what companies are best fits for remote work, and how best to mitigate the loss of passive information sharing/lower bandwidth of subtle communication cues would be a great subject for a book or article. My short version would be: it primarily solves a recruiting problem in extremely difficult to recruit for fields, takes advantage of a bit of arbitrage in some people's utility of remote work (introvert, commute, family, etc), and information needs to be overshared (more meetings than one might prefer, more documentation, more explicit processes, etc).