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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

If it's any consolation, I've spent most of my career working remote and I'd say probably the richest experiences I've learned from depended on who and what they were working on WAY more than them being there in person, and those richer experiences didn't really have a hell of a lot of zoom meeting and other distracting nonsense. The communication simply shifts to text based chat with a nice handy record of communication to look back on and consider over a longer period of time, where the information is more salient.

Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?

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I do get the issues with onboarding/mentorship (as well as social) especially right out of school. I suspect that many companies are just trying to do business as usual rather than adapting. It's also worth pointing out that we're talking about remote during a pandemic. In normal times, there's nothing to keep teams from traveling to a location for a week. (Yes, some people have travel issues for various reasons but in general the statement stands.)

I think the tough part is that fresh grads will benefit a lot from the senior developers being physically present, but I get the impression that many senior devs will choose not to come to the office unless they are required to.

So, I don't think it's as simple as letting people choose when and how often to come to the office. I could see a hybrid 2 days local / 3 days remote model working if physical presence is mandatory on those two days.

The challenge with a hybrid model is that you pretty much want housing that has a comfortable private work area and an at least semi-reasonable commute. That's probably fairly doable in a lot of suburban areas but it's harder for an urban office.

That said, I expect this will be quite common and people are probably more willing to have a 90 minute each way commute, say, if they only have to do it once or twice a week. (That's about what I'd be to go into our Boston office. That would be lousy to do most days--as I can attest to from a prior company--but it's not that bad to do once a week especially in the nicer weather.)

> Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?

This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.

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