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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are from existing lone wolfs who used to work remote before covid and never really worked in teams. We all know how successful (not!) outsourcing can be. Working from home is even worse.

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This is just provably false. Basecamp and GitHub are the famous counterexamples, but there are many, many more. (Although GitHub changed course when they got larger.)

Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it.

But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.

Basecamp has about 50 employees

This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.

Sounds like your personal experience. Which is fine but there are thousands of companies and teams that have found it to be just as good or better than butts at the same physical office

> Sounds like your personal experience.

You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective.

I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.

Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat.

Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output.

It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine.

Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.

> Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat.

I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration.

Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles.

In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.

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