It's not about collaboration, it's not about socializing, it's about money. Just like all other business related decisions.
I'm building my own company now, fully remote, and from an engineering output point of view I've never seen such productivity. No ass-in-seat supervision, no assigned hours, just straight throughput of engineering tasks being closed and features being shipped every day.
How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.
Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :)
Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine.
But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained.
IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.
I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.
FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments.
I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle.
I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide.
But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have.
Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
This whole exchange has been interesting. Thanks again.
I do think having diversity in all things is important, they push one's boundaries and allow oneself to redefine oneself. Taking care to reflect on the moment and the big picture, that's important.
Too much of anything is not a good thing, so there is always a need to balance. This allows one to translate skills from one interface to another. The big picture / in the moment reflection / introspection is important because it allows for self direction, instead of just getting caught up in all this mapping of skill set to skill set towards some ideal of being 'well rounded'.
I generally just prefer my base to be text because I code a lot and that's the headspace I need to stay in. Some communication, sparsely distributed in other forms is fine, but too much can direct away from the focus, which in my preference is produce good code, and solve problems in ways that get the closest to perfect I can get, without tipping the balance of losing sight of all the other code information, retaining structure and direction, uniformity, solutions for problems.
I don't enjoy living in a text vacuum as that can get severely isolating when done to excess, but sometimes having that space is necessary for me to continue laying out my own foundation of structure, preference, and direction, as I continue to learn new stuff.
Thank you for your interest and questions.
I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.
In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another.
So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.
And thus, there is no incentive to change it. Cause total productivity is the same.
Yeah, but people are replaceable. Whereas you, as an entrepreneur, only have one life to live. Choose wisely.
/s
Employee time is usually a lot more expensive than the space they occupy. At least in tech.
You could save quite a lot of money on furniture if everyone sat with their laptops on the floor. But in reality that would be more expensive since the difference in productivity will outweigh the furniture cost.
I would happily buy my own sodas (I don't drink them anyway), chips/snacks (I don't eat them at work), coffee (I do drink coffee!) if it meant I never had to sit in an open office environment again.
Accountants don't get to decide the office layout in my experience.
These days I mostly work remote by choice and am good with that. Some of it is better tech to work remote; I didn't even have broadband for most of my time in that former job. But it's also that I have no particular interest in spending a lot of time with coworkers generally beyond what I need to get my job done.
But I'm not sure that new engineers at that company were fundamentally different from new engineers joining, say, Facebook today.
Meanwhile, there's a thriving and growing industry selling desks in trendy open plan offices to self-employed people who for the most part could do their work in the privacy of their own home if they didn't think the atmosphere of an open plan office was worth paying for.
A lot of people I know work remotely in whole or in large part. But I've also worked with people who either felt the need for work-home separation or just found home to be too distracting a work environment in one or more ways.
I think the real reason is managers want to be able to see everyone at a glance; it's all about control.
Well it is still a bad decision. Libraries are an open work space and still manage to provide a reasonable working environment. This is less about money but more about a wrong perception of work.