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But collocated teams are still more efficient - there's plenty of studies that prove that. And my current job quite often has multiple teams from multiple empl

But collocated teams are still more efficient - there's plenty of studies that prove that. And my current job quite often has multiple teams from multiple employers/agencies from multiple time zones - even being able to have key meetings with all hand present would massively speed up - we could have avoided so many problems and delivered things months quicker.

wayoutthere 6y ago
In my experience, the efficiency benefits aren’t as clear-cut as you think. I have a client who is a big Fortune 10 company, with most of their engineering teams located in the same high-rise office building for this collocation efficiency benefit. They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office. If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Well I normally work with a well known brand and we often have main client 2 -3 locations two or three agencies agencies plus our dev/project teams a Liviv . Trying to get things done properly is very hard if we could have even kickoff meetings with every one in the room and have printed designs stuck to the wall
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Yeah, that’s why I think long-term it’s going to be coming into the office a few days a month for meetings, and WFH the rest of the time. Productivity is up and people are generally ok with the remote work situation — it’s the fact that they have to babysit their kids and can’t go anywhere for a change of scenery that’s causing the stress. And frankly most of the dev projects I work on are globally distributed anyway, so you’re never getting everyone in the same room to begin with.

wayoutthere 6y ago

In my experience, the efficiency benefits aren’t as clear-cut as you think. I have a client who is a big Fortune 10 company, with most of their engineering teams located in the same high-rise office building for this collocation efficiency benefit. They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office. If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.

walshemj 6y ago
Well I normally work with a well known brand and we often have main client 2 -3 locations two or three agencies agencies plus our dev/project teams a Liviv . Trying to get things done properly is very hard if we could have even kickoff meetings with every one in the room and have printed designs stuck to the wall
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Yeah, that’s why I think long-term it’s going to be coming into the office a few days a month for meetings, and WFH the rest of the time. Productivity is up and people are generally ok with the remote work situation — it’s the fact that they have to babysit their kids and can’t go anywhere for a change of scenery that’s causing the stress. And frankly most of the dev projects I work on are globally distributed anyway, so you’re never getting everyone in the same room to begin with.