A company with a few people vs. a company with a lot of people are two different beasts. If things are not rigidly defined, it can be a lot more effective for people to be around each other, especially in the phase of spontaneous brainstorming or kitchen conversation or happy hour drinks. Most new companies aren’t hiring super experienced engineers to grind out a high risk venture, and maybe those are the people least affected by remote. Much harder to train or onboard someone who’s remote if you’re starting from 0.

Maturity is correlated with age, but age isn’t as strongly correlated with talent. Just because a team is just as capable working remotely doesn’t mean they’re as generally capable as a different team that’s more effective in person.

How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?