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It's really, really hard to manage people remotely. It might be viable in technology only organizations where most of the product deliverables come in the forma

It's really, really hard to manage people remotely. It might be viable in technology only organizations where most of the product deliverables come in the format of pull requests, but if you're an organization with warehouses, field agents, sales people etc., it can get really hard. I think it's super easy to forget how much we're all just animals trying to do things that are way more complex than we're designed for. We have really great neural pathways for group management in person, from tone of voice, to posture to eye contact and other signalling. Everytime a manager says "Can you get this done sometime soon?" where they mean "sometime this week?" and an employee interprets it as "right now, please stress about this" you burn some political capital. When you're in the same room, it often comes across in tone and nonverbal queues and follow ups are way lower friction.

throwaway5752 8y ago
It really isn't that hard to manage distributed teams at all. I would say it is easier, because it forces you to be more systematic about how you measure productivity and hold your team accountable to commitments. It makes collaborative work (anything that would involve a whiteboard) a bit harder. However, as a manager, it is very hard to advance to director or higher levels. Having the full day of face time with mid/executive level is a big advantage. And it is hard to hire and introduces some difficult comp/HR challenges. Bringing it back to this topic, I think it makes a lot of sense as an IC or line manager to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier tech community for the quality of life balance.