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Comment by d0gsg0w00f | Hacker News Reader

I would hesitate to make such sweeping statements. As work returns to the office my prediction is that you'll end up with pockets of high functioning teams that are physically colocated and distributed teams will inevitably be at a disadvantage which will lead to them being relegated to "tolerate" despite the talent on those teams.

It's not to say that distributed teams can't be high funtioning it just takes 3x the effort from a management perspective. Good management is in even higher demand than SWE skills. A good manager will gravitate towards teams that are colocated because they know they can be more effective for less effort.

To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote. Talent currently holds the cards because of demand but talent+colocation will always win in a contest.

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I think you are overstating the importance of 'management'. In the modern world (i.e. not a factory or otherwise rote work) real business (and indeed societal) value is created due to the web of relationships between people who have at least some idea of what they are doing.

>To level the playing field it has to be all colocated or all remote.

Completely agreed. The way I see my situation playing out is that all of the employees who went remote during COVID will be tolerated, but that the company culture will revert to in-office first. That will eventually lead to the remote cohort slowly being relegated to irrelevance and passed for promotion until they disappear (including myself) through attrition. When that happens I will start looking for 100% remote companies. But for now I really don't care though, as long as they are paying me a Bay Area salary to live in the midwest.

My company was all in office culture until they could no longer hire or only hire really fresh/average workers in the local market. Ive been remotely for 4yrs (precovid), and promoted 3 times in that period. But im a SWE not a csuite or in hr or marketing.

Your job is what you make of it. I personally see WFH as the progression brought about by the internet; not covid. Covid just sped up the transition that was already happening. Covid brought about collective PSTD which forced peoples hand like any other trauma in ones life. It was the reason people stopped putting off there happiness, for the dream of success.

I would like to point out that you also appear to be making sweeping statements.

I don’t agree with you that colocated teams have an inherent advantage, or that they require more management to be productive than a remote team on average.

I imagine over time the permanent employees will be "managed out".

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