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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I worked in/led remote teams for around 8 years. Initial first few weeks are weird, then everybody hops on asynchronous communication (you can use phones/iPads whenever face2face is needed), people can take a walk in a park/forest to get fresh ideas (e.g. problems that took a week to resolve in the office took 2 hours while walking outside and refocusing brain). It's just too few companies are willing to take that "leap of faith". Some of my most memorable experiences were programming for two months in a cottage overlooking Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau on Hawai`i - that made me superbly productive, happy and driven - I would absolutely recommend/wish everybody to experience the same.

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Yes it’s a lot like going for it on 4th and 1. Statistically you have a better chance of getting a first down than not but no coach on the planet will risk it. In my own experience I worked remote for many years and I was incredibly efficient but I also was outside of the office politicking which was good and bad - for me it was probably more good because honestly the less I’m involved in politics the better. Later when I confounded a startup our mgmt team was 100% remote as a consequence of all having prior worked at a large company with many offices. It was productive but we found ourselves having more frequent and longer off sites to compensate and eventually we did coalesce most employees in one of three locations though many still had the option of remote. I enjoyed it a lot because it prevented work life from becoming too routine and we were still productive.

If I may ask, what type of work did the remote teams do?

It might be that a lot of disagreement about the viability of WFH is simply due to people having different types of work in mind.

One was a distributed messaging system (imagine geographically partitioned real-time clusters for investment banking and their transacted operations), another was a web app for creatives from a top company utilizing bleeding-edge tech and we created some innovative things competitors lack till this day. I don't think we would if we all were stuffed in some open-plan office somewhere as it required individual creativity and surprising solutions one could figure out in solitude only and only then discuss with the others... Both companies extremely well-known and darlings of developers world-wide (producing tech almost everybody used).

I would hope most tech firms would not notice or would encourage employees to go for a walk from 1-3pm if it helps solve a problem they’ve been working on for weeks!

Speaking from experience, they don't. I know this because I tried to introduce a walking culture into my team as I built it. Problem was whilst I could WFH my manager didn't believe in it, so everyone was hired into an office in the middle of the city. Walking in a busy city center is not quite as effective as doing it in the sort of place people tend to live. Also, he claims he thinks best whilst writing not walking so there's a mismatch of styles. But I guess mostly the issue is people aren't really expected to think too hard, just churn through tickets.

I am not so sure. Some managers just need to feel complete control over their teams. You also can't predict when the inspiration hits, it's not like you get great ideas every time you take a walk in a forest.

Did you just rent places for an extended period and work there? Sounds amazing.

Yes, it was AirBnB, minimal stay of 1 month. I managed to visit many places around the world but after ~2 years it got a bit boring (not sure I'd call that a 1st world problem, it's probably even worse than that ;-) This spot on Hawaii was not far from the Volcano, so walking on fresh lava was a funny past time (with a few destroyed shoes). But I had to conceal my whereabouts from my colleagues (i.e. show only white walls behind me while doing face2face) as they tended to react in ugly ways when I told them my first travel destination back then (Japan) and I decided not to risk destroying their morale (CEOs wife at that time reacted especially bad and held grudge for some time).

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