Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.
Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.
[citation needed]
It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
[citation needed]
It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed.
These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted.
It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop.
Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions.
How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?
It's not about incompetence, it's about not willing to introduce difficult changes and admitting they are wrong. See: open plan offices.
There's tons of successful, fully distributed companies.
Jobs are about relationships.
Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment.
I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer).
Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.
I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.
There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
To echo the refrain others have said in this thread, "Hire remote, hire remote, hire remote."
I would love to see HN's monthly Who's Hiring prioritize/bubble up fully remote jobs to the top of the list first. Give an advantage to those who are helping the situation. This is no different than roads. You can't just keep building roads forever. You have to destroy demand for local habitation once it reaches a point beyond which equilibrium can ever be reached, and the Bay Area is beyond that point. Let people work from places where they can afford to live better lives.
EDIT: @aerophilic: Agree entirely with your comment.
I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting.
There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.
Why does it make sense to optimize for the former instead of the latter? The benefits must be studied in context of how overall productivity and bottomline is affected, not just easy it is to start talking to someone.
I have found that what is in general most effective is that EVERYONE on the team is remote, or everyone is co-located. You can do hybrids, remote work with an on site team if the remote folks are strong communicators and/or people that are more task oriented (Assuming you have someone to manage them) but there is a tax on doing so, and often they won’t feel as connected.
Even in the above hybrid example, there are specific things you need to “plan in” to be effective (things like an office buddy, regular sync up times, clear responsibilities/action lists, etc).
Perhaps I'm weird, but I'm not interested in working remote. It's isolating socially and politically, and I work slower over the medium term.
This factoid detracts from the argument; When the op is about a (or several) company individually worth about a trillion dollars.
For what purpose specifically?
On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work.
On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.
Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.