Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder | Hacker News Reader

Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder

37signals.com

52 pointsmilesf26 comments

Hmmm...Not sure I agree with this, because I don't think it scales. Look at all the off-shore investment that corporations have investing in cheaper IT markets. Eventually those markets get more expensive. And then there's the quality debate for anything that requires multiple resources.

Also, theres a huge cost in time and risk in finding these remote resources, at least more so than Local.

But for finding a few golden-people for your small company, sure, that works.

You know, no matter how much disposable income I get in Warsaw, Poland, I can't make it suddenly sprout Dutch or Swiss quality of public transportation, health care, food and entertainment. And commuting (by public transport) encourages cohesion within cities as well. So yeah, sorry, but I'd rather have the 120, lower disposable, and live in a nicer place. I also remember climate in SF was pretty nice.

Not that remoting is evil or anything, but if it became a monoculture just like working from office was just a few years ago, the side effects can be devastating to some finer points of life. Too many great food places live off office workers eating lunch in them, and if a regular 15-minute rhythm train service between nearby cities stops making sense for commuters, my ability to visit a friend in there on a whim disappears as well.

There are plenty of cities in the world that have a cost of living that's a fraction of the cost of living in San Francisco but have just as impressive infrastructure and weather.

Can you point out some of those.

Minneapolis

Dang, I wish I had the results, but a friend of mine wrote some code to pull in data from several different sources on all of the cities in the world. He's a remote worker, single, and can live anywhere in the world. He compared all kinds of things including cost of living, weather, crime rate, internet speed, and a bunch of other variables.

He moved to Panama City, Panama.

So he had no attachment to any lover, friend, family, city or even country. Could be also described like hell on earth for some of us...

Sometimes your family & friends are already spread all over the globe, and you can't live near more than one or two of them at best.

Sometimes the city you're living in is a haunted place for you already -- after a severe personal loss, attack, stalker, etc..

Sometimes you suddenly find yourself with few close connections where you currently live (prime example: finishing grad school), and you have the opportunity to stretch your boundaries by not simply moving back to your hometown (or even home country).

Or you may just have "itchy feet" syndrome, and you start getting pretty unpleasant to be around if you're stuck in one town for more than a few years, seeing the same people around.

I'm married and we have two kids; each of us was born in a different country. I didn't leave the US initially for lack of people who liked my wife & I; to the contrary, the support of our friends was quite necessary because it was not always easy, initially. But it gets easier; and making human connections in a few disparate environments is enlightening, to say the least.

http://www.numbeo.com

That is step one.

Step two is that the best workers move out to cheaper locations -- after all why not command mostly the same salary from some tropical location? Look at how the people who take outsourced work in India live and compare it to your standard of living. Do you have a driver? Chef?

Anyway this is basically rehearsing the decades old arguments about outsourcing -- which didn't exactly kill software development in expensive countries.

One really annoying factor about collaboration across timezones is trying to get schedules to sync up. Especially if there is an 8+ hour difference. Back and forth communication ends up taking much longer and can significantly slow down the project. One interesting solution was examined in Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe [1] where online communities form based on the sleep cycles of people rather than their location.

It would be possible for remote workers to use melatonin supplements and light therapy to intentionally manipulate their sleep schedules to sync up with their HQ if they are willing to tolerate the offset from the local schedule. Even more interesting would be if everyone switches to something like Uberman [2] so that working at various timezones becomes feasible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Standard_Tribe [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

As I understand the various Uberman schedules, skipping a nap is a pretty serious issue - might be hard to schedule meetings that don't happen to cut into anyone's sleep schedule.

Yes, sometimes the timezone difference can be difficult if the two parties are not equally as empowered (or even as good). But I'll give you an example. A guy I was working with decided to transfer to my company's singapore office (12h difference). Working with him was awesome! I could be working on something all day, then write him an email on where things where at EOD, along with things I wanted him to take care of. When my morning rolled around again, everything was done, and I had an email from him sitting in my inbox of stuff I needed to look at. Our work was getting done literally 24 hours a day :P

Small colocated groups invested in the future of the company are always going to outproduce (comparing hours to hours) disparate resources pulled together on the fly.

The best exception to the colocation rule is the open source model, but OS can "get away with it" because the contributers are very, very invested in the outcome.

This is a straw man. Why would you compare one team invested in a company, to another, remote team 'pulled together on the fly'

I say this as part of a three man team, all remote from each other, and all invested in the company.

Because I've worked at no less than three companies that have done exactly that, and the entire basis of the article talks about the monetary value of how you can move hours around, completely eliminating the human nature of work and craftsmanship. People who work on projects that they aren't going to be associated with in the future usually care less about quality.

Working colocated is only one facet of the equation. I would think ownership is a well understood concept in the startup industry. Being invested means more than being colocated or even having a financial stake. (open source development -- again, some small number of passionate developers generally in it for the long haul)

This is absurd and false. Co-located teams waste time commuting, socializing, and are far more likely to get sucked into un-productive meetings. I've worked on plenty of telecommuting teams that were as or more productive than teams that were co-located.

This is exactly why we started Codedose[1] as a bunch of Java developers with origins in the banking/consulting industry: to stay with our families and friends in the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland, and keep our margin on the attractive level working remotely with UK companies. Getting on a plane to London is actually faster and more convenient than travelling to Warsaw by train.

[1] http://www.codedose.com

Another way of saying this is that "Things change. They change in all fields.In technology they change faster than most anywhere else."

I'm not sold on split teams, but I am sold on finding the right people no matter where they are. Another strategy that works is using remote workers as leverage. Lots of neat things happening here.

I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about. We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to buy them? We should make all of our workers noncompetitive? We should make the world economy conform to our ideas about how things work instead of how they actually work? None of that makes any sense to me, so I'm at a loss at what an intelligent person would be doing telling me these things.

As economies continue to get more virtual, we in technology will see how the flat world plays out ahead of folks like doctors and realtors. Interesting times ahead.

I like his vision. I hope it does come true.

To get there we need better collaboration tools. Although you can make it work with IM/email/VoIP, it's still kind of clumsy.

This argument will carry a lot more weight when there is a successful company (say, Instagram-successful) build and run by remote collaboration.

37signals doesn't count as a successful company?

Sure, but they are still essentially a Chicago company. http://37signals.com/svn/writers/

How about a company with principals/co-founders in different regions?

OP's argument didn't depend on the company being built entirely by a remote team. He just said that remote workers will become more popular.

That can mean entirely remote teams, or a team with a Central location and many remote workers.

We built Basecamp while I was working from Copenhagen, Denmark. I currently live and work and wrote that piece from Spain. Out of some 35 people, only about a third has base in Chicago. Out of that third, maybe half of them go to the office every day.

>I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about.

They're talking about not playing in a race-to-the-bottom for global wages, and using an internal market to the benefit of the majority of the people (instead of businesses), which might not like having to pay more for a device produce domestically, but they certainly like having a job economy and being able to afford housing and bread on their table.

>We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to buy them?

The guy without a job because his went to a least expensive overseas facility cannot afford many things in the first place, if anything. Getting things in a "more expensive fashion" would be great for him. And he's like the majority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com