Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

"Offices are a good idea for many jobs today, but there is one specific case where I think they’re no longer beneficial: software companies. What do programmers do all day?"

See what just happened there? The author jumped to the conclusion that "software companies" employ nobody except "programmers". That might be true for a tiny start-up, but once you reach a certain size, all types of other jobs spring up:

- Managing payroll, health insurance and other benefits

- Sales and marketing

- Legal and accounting: someone has to negotiate the contracts for data center services (even if all the services are outsourced); someone has to pay the company's bills; someone has to do the taxes and other legal paperwork (lots of extra paperwork if it's a publicly traded company); someone has to reimburse employees for travel and other expenses.

- Recruiting

Imagine a software company with just a hundred employees (not a very big company at all, compared to Facebook's 5000 or Google's 45000) that consists of just people working from home. It doesn't seem to scale.

Why wouldn't this scale? Sales people typically only work out of offices a couple days a week if that much. They can make sales calls from anywhere and typically close big deals in person outside of their office. Is there a particular reason you think this wouldn't work apart from no one is doing it now?

Distributed companies require strong product and project management cultures - if it's a product that's sellable by sales people, there might be a dozen tweaks a day that might flow in engineers' direction - TSV export on top of CSV, change the gradient schema to a darker blue color, find out why two records are missing from a large customer's account, etc.

In tight shops where sales sits next to engineers and personal relationships are built, those small issues tend to get resolved rather quickly, leading to happier parties on both end, happier customers and higher product quality.

In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as project manager, who then keeps and prioritizes a list of such requests. Sales people then complain that nothing ever gets done, and requests go into a vacuum, while engineers complain about too much bureaucracy and inability to concentrate on large projects with all the pesky requests streaming in.

> In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as project manager,

Why not a web forum or a chatroom? Some chat software even allows screen sharing.

If the company culture is supportive of such collaboration, that's a great thing to cherish. Frequently with no codified processes engineers would adopt a NMP ("Not My Problem") attitude, with questions getting ignored, and the rest of the organization paying less attention to the channel.

Yep. The company I work for (75-100 employees) is currently split between two offices, literally across the street from each other. Development, product, and QA are in one office, while sales, marketing, retention, accounting, and founders are in the other.

Even though we are literally across the street from each other, and even though we are together with like co-workers and departments, we've felt the same issue you've described here.

This is because we have grown lately and expanding our physical space has been... a complicated procedure. I'll be glad when we've moved into a single office again, which should happen by the end of the year.

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