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This really sounds like status quo bias to me. No one's going to tell you that face to face communication isn't an incredibly efficient medium, but that doesn'

This really sounds like status quo bias to me. No one's going to tell you that face to face communication isn't an incredibly efficient medium, but that doesn't mean teams and companies built around remote work can't (and don't already) thrive. I would even hazard that your experience is possibly colored by the teams you've worked on and the companies you've worked for.

nostrademons 12y ago
If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google. My personal preference, as a developer, is for remote work. But when I look at what the team actually accomplishes, the level of creativity in its solutions, and how quickly it accomplishes them, a colocated team almost always beats the distributed one. There's an energy that you can get when everyone is in the same room that's impossible to replicate when they're 1000s of miles apart. The cases where I think remote work can do fine is when you have a simple tool or interface that needs implementing, or if you're just trying to optimize one number (eg. performance of a library). These are the same situations you'd use a contractor for.
- dpritchett 12y ago
  I won't deny that colocation wins in a ceteris paribus scenario - almost by definition. Remote staffing allows you to tip the scales in many situations though: companies outside of the top 3-5 big tech firms suddenly have access to great people they'd never get otherwise. How many colocated 95th percentile developers are equivalent to one remote Linus Torvalds?

nostrademons 12y ago

If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google. My personal preference, as a developer, is for remote work. But when I look at what the team actually accomplishes, the level of creativity in its solutions, and how quickly it accomplishes them, a colocated team almost always beats the distributed one. There's an energy that you can get when everyone is in the same room that's impossible to replicate when they're 1000s of miles apart. The cases where I think remote work can do fine is when you have a simple tool or interface that needs implementing, or if you're just trying to optimize one number (eg. performance of a library). These are the same situations you'd use a contractor for.

dpritchett 12y ago
I won't deny that colocation wins in a ceteris paribus scenario - almost by definition. Remote staffing allows you to tip the scales in many situations though: companies outside of the top 3-5 big tech firms suddenly have access to great people they'd never get otherwise. How many colocated 95th percentile developers are equivalent to one remote Linus Torvalds?