Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient. Startups gain from the small tight knit team being able to do impromptu brain storming and discussions on the fly. Can’t do that when everyone is behind a monitor.
I am a firm believer that 100% remote work is actually a net negative for collaboration.
Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call.
There’s definitely a balance between in-office and WFH. WFH is great for corporate jobs cuz half your day is filled with boring meetings, but for start-ups, it’s the opposite.
The problem with statement's like yours is that there is no evidence to support the things you are saying.
- "I am a firm believer that 100% remote work as actually a net negative for collaboration."
You're entitled to your beliefs, but they are just that. I'd hate to see companies making decisions based on "feelings" they have in regards to one format being more effective than another.
- "Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call."
I'll counter your anecdote with my own: I've observed no difference.
And I'll add my own anecdote: the top performers on the 100+ software engineer org I work in are either fully remote or mostly remote. Losing our fully remote people would be catastrophic to the team. Collaboration with them is extremely easy, even from different time zones.
On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).
The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the ideas and conversations, not the drawing.
Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports, weather chat and complaints about the food by the watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to interesting ideas.
> On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus.
It's funny to hear all this hand wringing about the loss of spontaneous collaboration in offices, because in 10 years of working in tech offices in NYC, this was by far the dominant pattern: dozens of people sitting in a big open room wearing noise canceling headphones, talking to each other on Slack.
> Losing our fully remote people would be catastrophic to the team
you just made the case for losing the non-remote team and outsourcing everything to a cheaper time zone or even a cheaper country, because why not? after all, remote is so efficient. So why waste money on extremely expensive western labor?
> As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers
there could be people that, you know, haven't yet done that, like juniors or newhires
So... why can't a "good team" be assembled somewhere else that's 10x cheaper? Just like what happened to manufacturing, the Chinese and other nations actually turned out to have good - enough - teams to take a good chunk of the US market. So if I'm building my fully remote team, what advantage does a stateside worker have over Latam, or India, or some other location that has managers on the ground, tons (and growing) of Computer Science graduates, increasing knowledge of English, and in Latam's case, same timezones? Isn't that the culmination of remote?
It absolutely can be! Good talent is global (eg. I'm Australian).
But you suggested getting rid of the existing team in favour of a remote team in another country, because remote is more efficient. You lose more than you'll gain in the cost savings.
I'm fully on board with remote teams across the globe, especially when it means engineers can be on call while the sun is up.
Do it becuase it gives you access to talent, not because it's cheaper or remote is "efficient".
Australia is $$$$$ so for all purposes it falls into the same category as US for what I'm talking about.
In fact, it's even more of an illustration for what i'm trying to say. Let's assume all remote hurdles have been lifted, 100%. So, if I'm hiring for a new group initially based in Australia, what makes me recruit from a pool of 25mil people vs. 250mil people in Pakistan and 1400mil in India? Why in this case even have an Australian engineering team, ever?
The US is often 1.5-4x the engineering salaries we see over here, but the point was we're on the other side of the world.
My point was that remote teams across countries, and in some cases timezones, can work. But replacing a team just becuase you can get cheaper engineers is destructive.
Build a remote team on purpose, or let your team move to locations that requires them to work remote.
The point I'm trying to make is focus on the team and what's best for them. If it's a new team why limit yourself to one country.
> Why in this case even have an _________ engineering team, ever?
The same reason some engineers command more renumeration than others (in the same market), you find good talent and want them on board.
"there's no evidence to support the things you are saying, but they're wrong."
Is it really hard to believe that activities that rely on communication thrive in environments that support high-bandwidth communication? nb: lack of evidence does not substantiate the absence of something, it may mean nobody has bothered to collect the evidence (or that the evidence is difficult to capture).
It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to me. It was extremely dismissive. A simple 'but could you provide evidence?' would be fine. But no--it was more akin to "there is no evidence, your argument is invalid."
Maybe you didn't use the word 'wrong', but you did dismiss their opinion without consideration, and then proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point. So not only was your comment dismissive, but it was devoid of content or constructive conversation. Actually, the inclusion of the counter example actually made it the opposite of constructive imo.
Why participate in the same rhetoric you're throwing out, even for example, when what you're saying is already quite clear?
"It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to me" - altering a quotation in order to change it's meaning is lying. The fact that you interpreted what I said in your own way does not change that.
The OP's argument is invalid because there is no evidence. It seems silly to discuss that point further.
"proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point" - what fallacy is that? I never made any broad assertions and stated them as fact. I even stated that I was providing my own anecdote. The OP did the opposite. That is, they stated their anecdotal experience as fact. How any of this could be misinterpreted is beyond understanding, and is a you problem.
In my opinion, it seems like you are having a reading comprehension issue here.
You've fundamentally missed the point that I was making in order to take more 'technically correct' potshots.
Perhaps you should try to internalize the whole of my comment (i.e. comprehend it) before trying to reply again. Sniping individual pieces by being needlessly pedantic is--again--not productive to conversation.
Anyhow, I won't be replying again unless if you have something constructive to add to the conversation; I'm not interested in debate club with you. Perhaps ChatGPT is though!
A quick look at projects as huge as the Linux Kernel and its distributions (debian, arch, fedora), platforms such as kubernetes, apache, entire languages such as rust, python etc, databases (postgres, etc) shows this is nonsense.
Most of the internet is run on software built by geographically dispersed engineering teams working asynchronously. Software so well developed and innovative that companies as large and office based as Microsoft eventually had to back down and hop on the ride.
> Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient.
That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth. Perhaps depends on your role?
Honestly, for all the companies I worked in the past decade, the ones where I had better quality communication were the ones where I worked remotely.
Then again, I'm a software developer. Developers tend to be good at communicating through pull requests, documentation, screen sharing and text-based chat where you can send snippets.
> That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth.
Because it's obviously true.
Communicating through pull requests is shockingly inefficient. It can take days or even weeks to accomplish what face-to-face communication would accomplish in SECONDS.
IME face to face communication gives the impression that communication happened. The impression that a problem was discussed and solved. When talking people barely listen and just wait for their turn to speak and feel like they are contributing.
Written communication can be re-read, it can be looked at your own pace when you're focused. It can be challenged with comments and it's much harder to hand wave the questions away.
I honestly don't know why I have to explain this, it is, as I said, shockingly obvious.
First, the mega obvious: if I leave a PR comment, and you ignore it for several days, resolving the conversation will take several days! If I walk over to your desk and speak to you, now, that doesn't happen. Especially if we resolve the issue while I'm standing there, and I watch you type "git push".
Moving on...
In a Github PR (perhaps other interfaces are better!) you cannot comment on a line that wasn't changed. This can make it very difficult to point out problems caused by the way that added/changed code interacts with code nearby. It forces the reviewer to describe an outline of the issue, or paste bits of code and mention line numbers. It's possible to do this well, but it takes focus and clear writing. Folks who are not good writers, or who are communicating in a second language, struggle mightily with this.
...but if I can walk over to your desk (or you to mine), where I can point at the nearby code with my finger, there is no ambiguity. No need for careful English composition. No back-and-forth. I just point.
Honestly, have any of you in this thread ever had a face-to-face conversation?
Why would a face to face conversation help? A smile is going to suddenly explain why you using a 7 character variable is jeopardizing the project? People are so afraid to confront others in person so if you talk to them they will just accept your changes so they don't have to deal with the person breathing on them anymore? I can see that..
Yeah I think the balance should be hiring people local to your office who are willing to go in (ideally WANT to go in) but also give them the option to decide for themselves when they want to be in office vs at home. As much as I love working from home, if most of my team was together in an office that's a reasonable commute from my home, I'd definitely not want to be left out/behind by staying home everyday - personally.
That might work if you're working on a very popular stack, doing something like web development on react etc, but anything more specialised then that (unless you're in the valley or somewhere with a big tech community), is going to be a challenge to hire in. If you can hire globally the talent pool becomes much more fruitful.
Find people locally that want to go in. Filter the rest. Offer these people remote? Believe everyone will have a reasonable commute in and use the missing out emotional trigger to get people back. Then they can sit at their desk remote into meetings with others at different locations while talking as loudly as possible while everyone else puts their headphones on and browses slashdot?
Agreed. This is common sense, and is historically one of the main reasons why business travel exists. A caveat might be that "pure" software development jobs where the role is mostly to just sit and code probably have a smaller benefit. But for most early startups, such a job shouldn't really exist because there's so much more to do. I'd be interested to see the analysis done differently, comparing how people actually spend their time vs just where they spend it.
Having worked on a number of early stage startups and projects, in varied remote/in-person settings, and currently fully remote, the only thing I genuinely miss from an office is having a huge whiteboard to gather around.
In my experience, whatever gains come from increased communications bandwidth in-person are kind of a wash with losses to focused work being in a distracting environment.
"Net negative"? So you're saying that remote workers are uncollaborative? If that were true, all remote companies would have people that un-talked to each other, which is hardly the case. Maybe less efficient, but certainly not negatively. It is the small difference in collaborative efficiency that allows different types of people and organisations to function.
I am a firm believer that 100% remote work is actually a net negative for collaboration.
Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call.
There’s definitely a balance between in-office and WFH. WFH is great for corporate jobs cuz half your day is filled with boring meetings, but for start-ups, it’s the opposite.