Hacker News Reader

Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams.

A better approach would be to have distributed teams where the teams are cohesive unit with co-located members. Each team has local autonomy and a central mandate. The teams could be located anywhere but the team members would be in the same office.

Aliging distributed teams is easier as they can agree on coarse details , have few or limited dependencies and they execute on their own. Otherwise you are just shepherding cats.

View on HN

> I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams.

Provide examples/data for this or I cant take this comment seriously.

As someone who has worked on successful fully remote teams for 6.5 years I couldnt disagree more. My current team is mostly remote and moves Billions of dollars, delivers features at a rapid pace. It comes down to select the right team members, having centralized places of communication and empowering each member with the autonomy and ability to contribute no matter where they sit.

The "butt in seats mentality" is very outdated imo. How many hours are wasted commuting?

There are several fully remote companies collectively generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. To require physical colocation is a failure to properly manage, as well as delegate authority and responsibility.

> Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams.

Could you share data to back this assertion up?

I agree with you.

For me, I've been fully remote for many years and was primarily remote for a few years prior to that.

Companies I've been at where there is no flexibility whatsoever typically suffer from poor management or are the type of work place where there are pieces of hardware or other resources one can not really work on remotely.

One of the primary benefits for me when initially working remotely was the time saving that resulted not having to spend 1.5-2.5 hours a day in the car.

I used to strongly agree, until I worked on a successful distributed team.

If you insist on co-located, you will miss out on plenty of good engineers who will just work somewhere else that is distributed.

That said, if you have someone in leadership (especially high up the chain like a VPE) who is all about "butts in seats," your distributed team is designed to fail. And I'd argue that that leader is probably doing their part to ensure it fails to prove themselves right about co-located being better.

What prevents distributed teams from being cohesive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com