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In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build.. Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the i

In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build.. Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful. The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.

chii 3y ago
> ...etc happened without a big office while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.
- onion2k 3y ago
  I'm not calling any of them solo productions. Linux and the internet were both massively collaborative projects built by many people who met up maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not all of them at once ever. They were globally distributed. Being in an office together was not necessary for the success of those things, which were some of the hardest technical research projects ever, so I'm questioning if people really need to be in-person to make YouTube or GMail. (I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)
- ghaff 3y ago
  >i dont think you can call the internet a solo production No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.
marcinzm 3y ago
Is your average company made of some of the most brilliant and driven and experienced people in the world in their fields? Do they have no actual business goals but a wide open field to just do something big and different and impactful? If so then literally nothing else matters except not getting in their way. But there's very few cases like this.
wepple 3y ago
> Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? Stating that it’s possible is very different to stating which model might be more effective or faster. Unfortunately we don’t have a parallel universe where torvalds lived on the same street as a bunch of other collaborators to compare
- civilized 3y ago
  I bet if we talked to Torvalds about it, he'd have an incredibly strong opinion to share, and I don't have any difficulty guessing what it would be. Indeed, searching for "Torvalds remote work" yields this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-linus-torvalds-on-working-from-home/?ref=itsfoss.com https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-l... > Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it." > "If you spend hours in online meetings from home, instead of spending hours in meetings at the office like you used to, you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse."

chii 3y ago

> ...etc happened without a big office while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.

onion2k 3y ago
I'm not calling any of them solo productions. Linux and the internet were both massively collaborative projects built by many people who met up maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not all of them at once ever. They were globally distributed. Being in an office together was not necessary for the success of those things, which were some of the hardest technical research projects ever, so I'm questioning if people really need to be in-person to make YouTube or GMail. (I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)
ghaff 3y ago
>i dont think you can call the internet a solo production No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.

marcinzm 3y ago

Is your average company made of some of the most brilliant and driven and experienced people in the world in their fields? Do they have no actual business goals but a wide open field to just do something big and different and impactful? If so then literally nothing else matters except not getting in their way. But there's very few cases like this.

wepple 3y ago

> Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? Stating that it’s possible is very different to stating which model might be more effective or faster. Unfortunately we don’t have a parallel universe where torvalds lived on the same street as a bunch of other collaborators to compare

civilized 3y ago
I bet if we talked to Torvalds about it, he'd have an incredibly strong opinion to share, and I don't have any difficulty guessing what it would be. Indeed, searching for "Torvalds remote work" yields this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-linus-torvalds-on-working-from-home/?ref=itsfoss.com https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-l... > Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it." > "If you spend hours in online meetings from home, instead of spending hours in meetings at the office like you used to, you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse."