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I think this subject is more nuanced than these studies. A few things that come to mind: * Do the personalities of the workers have an effect? I would imagin
by j_baker 16y ago
I think this subject is more nuanced than these studies. A few things that come to mind:
* Do the personalities of the workers have an effect? I would imagine that introverts could handle remote collaboration better than extraverts.
* Does the type of job matter? For instance, I would imagine that it might be a lot more difficult to build a remote team of investment bankers than it might be to build a remote team of programmers.
* Are certain phases of a job easier to handle remotely? For instance, perhaps coming up with an architecture needs to be collocated but the actual process of coding might be more productive if handled remotely. Or perhaps writing a research paper can be handled remotely, but editing it needs to be collocated.
I do find the third of these points the most interesting though. It might be possible that there are certain parts of a project that are bottlenecks unless collocated. Thus, it might be possible to build a remote team, but fly them in for critical parts of a job.
Regardless, I think this study is interesting, but I'd take it with a grain of salt. I don't doubt that this is true for the average person. But that's really not relevant. What's relevant is whether it's true for your team and your job.
- fleitz 16y agoI think you're on to something with the extroverts, particularly that extroverts would be more likely to work closer together and for this study be more likely to talk up their paper to a large number of people.
- PakG1 16y ago>> * Does the type of job matter? For instance, I would imagine that it might be a lot more difficult to build a remote team of investment bankers than it might be to build a remote team of programmers. >> * Are certain phases of a job easier to handle remotely? For instance, perhaps coming up with an architecture needs to be collocated but the actual process of coding might be more productive if handled remotely. Or perhaps writing a research paper can be handled remotely, but editing it needs to be collocated. Nitpicking, but I think the 3rd question is invalidating the way the 2nd is phrased. Comparing investment bankers and programmers is difficult to put as apples to apples. Easier to compare investment bankers to architects or analysts to programmers at a detailed level (although admittedly many investment bankers would be their own analysts, just as many programmers would be their own architects). Perhaps the 2nd question would be better phrased as "Does the type of industry matter", rather than "Does the type of job matter". Here's one anecdote of where it's easy enough for financial guys to have analyst work done by non-colocated people, and still achieve success: http://www.businessinsider.com/pine-river-bejing-china-beijing-quants-math-geniuses-2011-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/pine-river-bejing-china-beiji...