Fully remote and geographically distributed? Co-located but flexible work from home days? Remote, but close enough for weekly in person? Remote work is the root of all evil?
My perceived optimal: A geographically close team, with flexibility to work remotely whenever beneficial.
Why?: Remote work has a lot of well known benefits that speak to me: no commute, potentially less distractions when you really need to just work, potentially more flexibility on hours when you need to work around appointments or childcare, etc. BUT, there is a certain energy level when a team is really together that seems very hard to replicate remotely. How much time together is enough to replicate this? Would even a weekly beer night be enough?
My experience: For 8.5 yrs I worked at a semiconductor lithography tool manufacturer. 3 years in person, 4 years remotely but a ~3 hr drive from the office for important meetings, etc, and 1.5 yrs a plane ride away. The fact we were building hardware likely makes this fairly different from a SW only business. Having worked in person before going remote seemed really critical for work relationships. Coming in every few weeks seemed like barely enough to keep up with the energy level and the relationships. And an unexpected benefit was that traveling to the office frequently ended up as an excuse for the team to go out for drinks, or for me to spend much more time with visitors from our international headquarters than I might have if I was going home. The later time being a plane ride away felt like too infrequent of interactions and I slowly drifted away from the energy.
Now I’ve been working on a pure software project with 1 co-founder. We primarily work from home, but live close enough to meet whenever it seems helpful. And we already have a long history with each other. This works out well for 2 of us, but I’m not sure it can scale.