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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

The Linux kernel and most other open source projects have primarily been built by fully remote teams. But every few days there’s a thread full of people wringing their hands about how there’s no way to do spontaneous, creative, collaborative work remotely.

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What you say is true, but I think there's often a detail missing from these conversations: culture.

What I mean is that OP's question and your answer both have a context which isn't always explicit in these conversations.

The Linux kernel development, and I would argue most successful remote shops, have had a "remote first" culture from the beginning, or, if remote was something that came up later, have had a change in culture.

My client, for example, has a culture where people would just drop in and ask random questions. Or you would overhear people talking about something and you'd jump in. During lockdown, this wasn't possible anymore. So they would start having meetings among "stakeholders", which, in the above story would be the people initially in the conversation, and reach some sort of decision. The other people wouldn't be able to jump in during the conversation. They could of course argue with the decision, but sometimes they'd find out about it "too late".

Contrast this with a culture where everything is done in public, for everyone to see and with a possibility for everyone to intervene during the discussion, as is the case on the LKML or as I suppose is the case in a remote-first company. There would be discussions say on slack or some other communication tool where even people not directly invited could at least have a look and see what's emerging.

I think that those people "wringing their hands about how there’s no way to do spontaneous, creative, collaborative work remotely" are people used to working in in-person cultures. Not only that, but it's very likely that the companies where they work are very "in-person" companies and that those companies have a hard time adapting to the remote way of doing things. It's not enough that some people would try to make this work. For this to actually work, there has to be a serious change in how the company itself works.

In your example company, I think remote work may have been the catalyst for the change you’re talking about in the specific case. But what if they’d introduced some other small change that had nothing to do with remote work like moving the conference rooms to the other side of the building so that people not in a conference couldn’t easily tell there was a meeting going on. Each time the environment changes, new building, new project etc... we don’t think it’s necessary to have had a different culture from the beginning or to completely remake the culture from the ground up. We just make the appropriate changes.

Culture has to adapt to the environment. There’s nothing special about it being remote.

If you have an open office and everyone is constantly having loud, impromptu meetings in the same space, that’s just as much of a problem.

In my example I wasn't talking about formal meetings in conference rooms, but exchanges between people in the same office space. There's always a tendency for people to ask what's been decided in the meeting right after it ends when they weren't present. This could be reproduced in a remote environment. Indeed, I think the minutes from the meeting should be published, even in an in-person office.

> Culture has to adapt to the environment. There’s nothing special about it being remote.

I totally agree with you. The only issue is that this adaptation may take some time. In my client's example, this was considered a temporary thing. Most people were switched to part-time, etc. I think they merely considered the remote thing as a bump in the road, and this situation may be pretty common among companies affected by shelter in place directives.

I think people may be surprised by the sudden change, and they are looking for ways to adapt. In the beginning, they will try to reproduce what they were doing before, which, of course, may not work as well. Which contributes to their frustration. I don't think that if they were forced to stay remote for a long time (some six months to a year at least) they would continue trying to fit the square peg in a hole that's become round. Maybe some would, but I'm hopeful that a sufficient number of people would try to adapt so as the change the surrounding culture.

Speaking of this, studies of open source projects have also shown that the primary barrier to communication is organisational distance (i.e. how far up the chain of command you have to go until you have a manager in common) and not physical distance.

(Personal hypothesis: this is probably more of an issue with the type of organisation that values a hierarchical departmental layout inspired by the industrial revolution, instead of smaller Toyota production system-style teams.)

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