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Comment by uniclaude | Hacker News Reader

Not saying that you are wrong, but none of the studies you quote was done in the last five years, and most of them are actually more than a decade old.

The technologies we use to communicate evolve fast, and I would bet money on the fact that (probably because of mindset evolution and tooling) developers are now more efficient when working remotely than they were ten years ago. Moreover, as we are on HN, we are not necessarily talking about average developers, but more about the ones that are used to Git, IRC, Trello, and other tools which make remote work more doable.

Startup environments are not average, and this must be why companies like Github and 37signals can be successful while having remote workers.

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Not saying that you are wrong, but none of the studies you quote was done in the last five years, and most of them are actually more than a decade old.

Actually - several of them are. For example:

"Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006)"

This is one of the things I find fascinating. You see the same kind of thing over thirty years as technology changes radically. This makes me think that there's something quite interesting happening in meat-space.

Startup environments are not average, and this must be why companies like Github and 37signals can be successful while having remote workers.

Just to repeat. I am not saying that you cannot be successful being distributed. There are lots of good and sane reasons to be distributed.

I'm saying that there is a bunch of evidence that being co-located is more effective.

2006 happened 7 years ago. Time flies.

Software changes in 7 years - people don't. [I mean the average person; individuals age and get more experienced, but new ones come in.]

Today's homo sapiens brains function the same way as in 2006. Productivity of mental workers responds to disruptions in the same way as in 2006. A large majority of programmers and other people working now in IT are the very same people that were analyzed in 2006.

Brain function is not the only variable at play here. Software and culture change constantly.

Yes, but haven't the tools for working remotely improved a lot since 2006?

Not really - no. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I couldn't do six years ago.

There are a few more options maybe - but nothing fundamentally different.

They have, but if you look at it in terms of fundamental change, then of course not.

For example, a cell phone from today isn't fundamentally different than a cell phone from a decade ago. They're both computers and can be used to make phone calls. But with the cellphone of today, I can have a virtual meeting with anyone from anywhere, face-to-face. That alone is a huge improvement for distributed teams.

It's not every day you get to use the phrase "technologies we use to communicate evolve fast" and IRC in the same paragraph.

Oops, I was sure I was going to get caught on that one, but couldn't really help myself.

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