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Comment by klardotsh | Hacker News Reader

The office or otherwise mandatory frequent in person work sessions bit seems pretty at odds with the underlying idea that you’re a team focused on actually delivering and building with deep focus. What does commuting a half hour, hour, or more, each way to an office to put my headphones on and zone in, do to achieve any of that? I’m gonna be able to do that more effectively, more focusedly, and at the hours I’m most productive, remotely. The commute is strictly a distraction.

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> The office or otherwise mandatory frequent in person work sessions bit seems pretty at odds with the underlying idea that you’re a team focused on actually delivering and building with deep focus.

It’s at odds with being pro-AI too. If you can’t effectively collaborate with somebody who is not physically present but is just a voice on a call or words on a screen, what does that imply about how effectively you can collaborate with AI? Are these people building robot bodies for Claude’s GPUs and making those robot bodies sit in office chairs across from them? Would that make them more productive?

But AIs aren't humans, so why would we need to interact with them the same way? AIs also don't fill the same role in a team as humans do (at least, not in the kind of team discussed in this post).

> But AIs aren't humans, so why would we need to interact with them the same way?

One could argue that some AIs are like SOME humans. After all, you and I are both humans but we are not the same and no reason why our colleagues would interact with us in the same way. Nuance

Same. I find myself much more productive. I do like coming in every once in awhile for the rapport and cultivating working relationships face to face though.

Yep, 2-4x onsites together a year to develop human relationships, and otherwise 100% remote, is by far the most effective team arrangement IME. It is especially the most accessible format for people who do not necessarily perform their best work within the typical office hours (9-5, +/-1), who do not want to live in your metro area, or who are distracted by disturbances in their surroundings - or just aren’t hardcore extroverts.

Or simply put: if you truly want the best, most focused, highly performing team, an office requirement shrinks your talent pool tremendously for extremely little gain. Do quarterly meetups somewhere and move on, IMO.

Quarterly is a lot, depending on travel distance and whether weekends are needed for travel, for folks with families.

Agree, 4x is doable only if you have no kids. Otherwise you not only create a lot of stress for the other parent but you also lose valuable time with your family, which you won’t recover as kids grow up. I feel like 2x is reasonable.

I don't have kids and I'm still more on team 2x/yr than 4x/yr by a large margin, but I'll still take 4x/yr for ~3 days each over in-office daily (or even twice a week). Mentioned it mostly as a compromise option I could accept (and IIRC that compromise is what 37signals did and documented in the Remote book which I haven't read in quite some time).

The commute doesn’t help you, but working in an office next to your team mates will accelerate your work.

Software development is a team sport and individual productivity is not the same as team productivity. Communication bandwidth in person is much higher when colocated. Startups move fast and higher bandwidth increases velocity, reduces errors, improves quality and team cohesion.

For other situations remote can be “good enough”, and has advantages eg bigger recruitment pool or cheaper labour, but in general in person is just going to be a lot faster with higher quality results.

A lot of engineers don’t wish this to be true, because wfh is often better for them as individuals, but it is what it is.

I’ve worked in plenty of startups (the overwhelming majority of my career, actually) and did not perceive the performance of in-office teams to be significantly better than the remote teams I’ve been on. The floor is probably lower for remote teams (in that ineffective remote teams are horribly ineffective), but the ceiling is comparable, and the average is (again, in my experience) anywhere from comparable to slightly better, because folks are working the ways+hours they’re most effective, not what someone else thinks should be the most effective.

I think it depends on your job role. I’m more architecture and operations in past lives, and being together is really powerful and reduces time taken for many tasks.

If you’re an engineer or developer mostly working a backlog, totally different story - wherever you are most comfortable working is ideal.

Either way, dogma is terrible. I have a friend who is a specialist in a specific area of finance who has been WFH for 20 years. Now she’s commuting to an office in a city about 300 miles away from the rest of her team, because the big boss says come to the office.

> The floor is probably lower for remote teams (in that ineffective remote teams are horribly ineffective), but the ceiling is comparable, and the average is

Agree, and the difference between the floor and ceiling is typically leadership. Not just by the executives but everyone who works there.

I use this kind of opinion as my idiot bat signal now. It’s so obviously untrue when someone starts spouting this nonsense you know they are a very feelings based decision maker.

I have been leaning the other way. There’s room for nuance in the discussion but a stance of certainty that full remote is just more effective screams “expert beginner.”

There’s a third option: some people work best alone / remote. Some people work best in an office.

There’s more than 3 options. That’s what the nuance is about.

Sometimes individual productivity isn’t even the measure of success and sometimes it needs to be sacrificed for group productivity.

> some people work best alone / remote. Some people work best in an office.

this is true, and irrelevant to my reasoning.

Got any evidence of this or is just vibes based?

Unsure why the status quo needs evidence but remote doesn't, but which part of my reasoning do you require evidence to believe?

The two most productive startup software teams I've worked on have been 100% remote. The least productive was 100% colocated. Anecdotal evidence only but so far I'm not seeing any reliable quantitative evidence for your claim.

"software development is a team sport"

I have heard people state this like it is obviously true. Not so sure.

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