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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.

I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live.

I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures.

That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?

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It seems like most hip startups want you in their office, drinking coffee/beer/coolaid with the rest of the team. I don't know more companies don't give a distributed team a chance, but from my observations it seems like they're all inherently against the idea.

I don't know what you qualify as 'hip', but beyond the initial three or four first people in a startup, many startups are more than willing to start hiring remote workers.

This is especially true when you're looking for workers with very specific skill sets. It's generally easy to find a generic Java developer locally, but if you're looking for, say Cassandra experts (like we are at DataStax, with an office in Austin), then you're probably willing to hire someone anywhere in the world if they're good enough.

Distributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply involved in the entire company, not just writing code.

In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely.

Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway, because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to compensate for not being physically present.

I get this, as I worked in a startup and saw how many of the early employees started to fill in leadership roles within the company. However, we had remote teams too and they worked out just as well. Our VP of Development for a long time was remote too.

I do agree that it's not optimal in every situation, and your culture has to adjust for it. I'm just saying, if there is a talent crunch, companies need to be willing to take steps to handle it. Distributed teams are one such option.

The distributed model imposes a cost that most startups would rather not pay. There's a lot of communication latency that occurs once a company becomes distributed. It takes a high level of aggregate professional maturity and attentiveness to communication to work.

Some teams, usually small ones, can make distributed work work, but it doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't form the sort of culture startups generally want.

That said, the distance metric isn't linear. Across a parking lot is almost as far as 1000 miles away. Once a company is scaling to this point, remote-work arrangements make a lot of sense.

Because face to face is that much more valuable; there's no replacement for it; it's worth it

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