- Politics / Face Time. Some people really do think that nothing goes on when people are working from home. Some people like to have everyone's attention now and again, to demonstrate something about their status.
- They haven't figured out how to do it yet, both technically and socially. If you have one or two people who don't know how GitHub works, or how Trello or Slack work, you can't do it. There are certain people who come from an age where you never needed productivity tools, and they just can't use them, no matter how easy it is. Unfortunately, they tend to be the people who can decide whether remote is working out for the team.
- They haven't figured it out socially: some people have configured their home life in a way that doesn't work for remote. The associations between being in the home and being away from home are deeply ingrained in some folks.
As for actual productivity, I've found it skyrockets in a properly functioning remote team. We have a Slack/Trello/Github/etc mashup where Slack is the hub. Anything that comes up can be pinged to the right person, and you can see when people are pushing code. The cards let you organise things. No commute + set your own hours means you get things done.
Not being tied to a location is great, too, though I do try to make sure the family gets enough attention.
Technically/Socially - An issue for all offices. I don't see my TFS to git migration going as well virtually. In person groups worked well. It's works well for a lot of things and often.
Productivity - Chat/SCM/etc are the hub regardless of physical location. In person we have access to white boards and pairing stations.
Commute - Every cyclist and public transit commuter gets a workout and decompression time. I still set my own hours with a core hour preference and accepting meetings that fit in my schedule.
Don't assume it's a technical and social issue. There's a spectrum of personalities and needs. I tried working from home with all the tools and a competent team socially. It was one of the worst positions in my life and had nothing to do with the work. I prefer my home away from home.
If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for.
Studies are mixed on the pros/cons of office vs remote. For example a Stanford study showed productivity increased 9 to 13% for remote office workers. Some have shown that collaboration can increase as well as communication was more intentional (I don't remember the study offhand).
Anyways, point is it's not all or nothing and the data is still out on effectiveness and efficiency (I'd think it also depends on the nature of the work etc)
Others on the team function differently
Compare:
1. A role which requires very little communication with the rest of team and quite a lot of long, uninterrupted concentration.
E.g. a developer working a long time on some internally intricate sub-system which has well-defined interfaces to the rest of the system.
2. E.g. a UX designer (or perhaps a product manager) who needs to talk to many people, whose projects shift quickly, whose work affects many other people's work, etc.
This is far better than simply talking to many people 1 to 1. It creates a written history indicating why each design element was chosen. It allows stakeholders to understand the requirements behind a particularly strange UX choice and allows them to give suggestions for better UX in a way that takes those requirements into account. Iteration can be faster as comments can be taken from all sides at the same time instead of having to seek people out and set up meetings.
I only see positives for a UX designer given the nature of their work is highly visual, functional and is cross-organizational. In fact, I think any company NOT doing UX design this way is probably being inefficient?
Sad but true.
Maybe that's not what Silicon Valley is for, in some grand cosmic sense, but I'd require some convincing that it isn't what Silicon Valley actually mostly does.
Our new management came in with "no more remote!", but then trying to keep up with what SV is "for" has been a giant hassle and destroyed ability to deliver.
I've also interacted quite a bit with the Spring team, either in the office or through Slack. They are a fully distributed team, some of whom choose to work in various Pivotal offices because of the amenities.
Both approaches work, they just work differently. The cats-and-dogs arguments people have about local/remote is, in my experience, largely about personal preference.
Both because people may slack of when unsupervised, and because you want a team dynamic where you can have a quick 10 minute meeting about stuff, and so on.
Maybe Oculus Rift will be the beginning the end of astronomical SF real estate prices.
Some of it is also cultural. If you're not going to have drop by conversations and other serendipitous meetings, you need to be more disciplined about having those conversations anyway even if they wouldn't have historically risen to the level of sending an email or making a call.
It's really hard to turn an office culture into a remote culture.
I experienced this at my last employer (Heroku). We hired a ton of great remote staff, but there was always an impedance mismatch. Lots of local people still want to solve problems face to face.
It's much easier to start remote from scratch.
I am doing this with my new venture (Convox).
There are challenges. The high bandwidth face to face time is indeed better for problem solving. And is truly important for serendipity. But we are willfully trading those things in to work from home, live all around the country, and not spend money on an office.
Even YC is behind the curve here. They make you move to Mountain View and tell you distributed startups don't work.