If you have to have people in the office to make sure they're working, you already have a fundamental hiring problem.
For many types of problems, collaborating in person works far better than collaborating online. Lower friction, easier to have a conversation, easier to sit around a computer and experiment, and generally easier to handle things in a few minutes that would take longer otherwise.
I do decentralized development regularly, and for some kinds of work it works fine. For other kinds of work, it makes simple tasks take an order of magnitude longer.
On the other hand, the development of any one individual patch series to implement one feature typically occurs either by one developer, or by a set of co-located developers in one organization, not by geographically distributed developers. And some other kinds of work, such as backporting or rebasing a series of patches, doesn't work well when geographically distributed.
I worked at a 100% telecommute shop local to Chicago for 10 years. We also used offshore development firms on some projects, and I can tell you, if anyone ever seriously had the idea of replacing us with them, they were quickly dissuaded by the experience of working with these firms.
Plus, it's really hard to eat healthy at a tech company.
Maybe there's a future where seamless video conferencing, Beam robots, and better text communication could replace in-person conversation, coffee and lunch chats, and other office-place experiences. I've tried, and I don't think we're there yet.
Obviously for small startups this doesn't make sense. But mid to late stage, opening a satellite office for development somewhere else seems like a no brainer. I assume I'm missing something though.
Our secret sauce is one thing. Exactly one thing. What do you mean "tangentially related" we'd outsource anything unrelated.
The exit strategy is to be bought by a multinational megacorporation not to have two offices, or even ten. There's sort of a financial fund raising dead zone between having one office and being purchasable and having 500 offices and buying little companies. Very few companies jump that gap and its safer to try and get bought that to try and become Google2.0
Google Hangouts is decent for every type of sharing except "let another user control my computer directly".
I can press a button and usually within a few seconds I can see the chat recipient's screen on my end. Now I can watch his screen and we can pair with voice chat. I have my own screen to do occasional Googling and pasting info to chat if needed.
Basically I would find that far more efficient than unplugging my laptop, walking up to someone's office, plopping down, having to Google something while we pair, and now show him my laptop because there's no way to get it on his screen without duplicating the search work on his machine.
> If you have to have people in the office to make sure they're working, you already have a fundamental hiring problem.
It is possible to be remote and have your screen recorded to make sure you are typing for 8 hours, vs. being local and just being trusted to get on with it.
People think if they can keep jobs in the office then they can keep themselves in a job.
But yeah, your everyday, run-of-the-mill corporate coding job can easily be done at home. The problem is a trust factor with these companies: they don't trust the tools that enable remote working as much as they don't trust their ability to manage their remote people.