There has been a flurry of remote work pros/cons posts and discussions recently. In the end, it is what works best for the team. There is no one size fits all.

There has been a flurry of remote work pros/cons posts and discussions recently. In the end, it is what works best for the team. There is no one size fits all. A lot of people prefer the distraction free work environment, but I would argue that LOC/hour or developer velocity but not be what is best for the entire team. If everything is isolated and everything has deep domain knowledge, heads down can work fine. When that is not the case, it requires a lot of active investment in over communicating between local/remote people and explicit use of lots of tools. If the business prefers everyone local, they have to also acknowledge that along with the ad hoc sharing and other benefits, there are also downsides. I've worked at top 5 internet properties where you ended up being in 6 hours of meetings a day. A lot of developers also find it hard to concentrate in a fully open space. The business needs to recognize this and provide smaller, team based areas that are separate from everyone else. They also likely need smaller isolated rooms for people who work best in a quiet and distraction free environment. I think the thing that I've seen missing in all of these discussions recently is that it has been very I centric. "I hate open floor plan." or "I tried remote workers at my business". This narrative needs to acknowledge that a project/product team is a group of people and compromises will be needed by everyone if the team is to be its most successful at adding value for the business. Well, at least I think so...