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Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective. As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It me

Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective. As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily. If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.

runako 5y ago
As I indicated, there has been a lot of published research on this specific topic as applied to software engineering teams. I would suggest you start with _Peopleware_ by DeMarco & Lister as a survey. This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that: - it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard - it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.) IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
canyonero 5y ago
Curious what makes you think distributed teams are less effective? I've personally been much more effective with my output working remotely than I ever was with the noise and distractions of the office. I've seen excellent productivity from my colleagues as well in remote settings, too. It's unfortunate that companies and individuals, like yourself, can't respect the fact that others _are_ more effective remote and when they're not getting tapped on the shoulder by random colleagues. As your GP comment pointed out remote vs in-office productivity likely breaks even. Companies should treat their employees like adults and let them work where they feel most productive and not cater to the preferences of upper-management or a desire to return to the status-quo.
- librish 5y ago
  The only thing I said was that I preferred to work remote. I want to work at a company where self selects into being on site.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  I'm sure these mythical people exist but I never run into them. Every coworker I've met that is more "effective" at home is really just trading team velocity for personal velocity. They feel more productive by getting more of "their stuff" done but it happens at the expense of the overall teams speed.
  - runako 5y ago
    > just trading team velocity for personal velocity. The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way. What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as: - critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit) - that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down - team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person - team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff - etc. It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded." Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste. This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.

runako 5y ago

As I indicated, there has been a lot of published research on this specific topic as applied to software engineering teams. I would suggest you start with _Peopleware_ by DeMarco & Lister as a survey. This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that: - it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard - it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.) IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.

canyonero 5y ago

Curious what makes you think distributed teams are less effective? I've personally been much more effective with my output working remotely than I ever was with the noise and distractions of the office. I've seen excellent productivity from my colleagues as well in remote settings, too. It's unfortunate that companies and individuals, like yourself, can't respect the fact that others _are_ more effective remote and when they're not getting tapped on the shoulder by random colleagues. As your GP comment pointed out remote vs in-office productivity likely breaks even. Companies should treat their employees like adults and let them work where they feel most productive and not cater to the preferences of upper-management or a desire to return to the status-quo.

librish 5y ago
The only thing I said was that I preferred to work remote. I want to work at a company where self selects into being on site.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
I'm sure these mythical people exist but I never run into them. Every coworker I've met that is more "effective" at home is really just trading team velocity for personal velocity. They feel more productive by getting more of "their stuff" done but it happens at the expense of the overall teams speed.
- runako 5y ago
  > just trading team velocity for personal velocity. The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way. What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as: - critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit) - that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down - team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person - team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff - etc. It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded." Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste. This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.