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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home?

Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth.

If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it.

What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question.

(For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)

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Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters.

We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors.

I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person.

I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership.

I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident.

I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.

More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be closer to:

"We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what challenges it might introduce"

It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a compromise (we couldn't find anyone better, closer). So many of us literally make tools that throw rocks at the problem of erasing physical space (including you). I find constant inspiration in remote working that gets fed into the tools I build, and that's far from the only benefit. I'm not arguing that it's better, I'm arguing that it's not worse.. and if anything, is likely a rounding error in the equation of who the best person for your company is.

Also, all other things are never equal.

Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.

Hiring remotely makes this harder.

(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:

I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining confidence.

Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)

Collaboration is hard. It's harder when you're not in the same room. You can bend over backwards to try to make remote collaboration productive, but the state-of-the-art is nowhere near as good as being in the same room, at least for some kinds of collaboration.

Votizen is an early-stage startup still trying to develop its own company culture.

If you have a bunch of remote employees, it's not going to be easy.

Basically, it's nice to walk over to someone's desk and chat.

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