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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

I still want to see a good argument against the startup notion that you have to all come together and work as a team. That a close knit group of 5 - 50 people in a startup in one location has a competitive advantage (via constant facetime) than a remotely built comparable startup. Every year the Bay Area becomes more insanely expensive yet young devs and entrepreneurs still flock there in droves.

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Even if you start from the premise that, for a given developer, that developer contributes more locally than remotely, there's still a pretty good argument for remote work: talent pool.

You can have a fair-to-middling programmer in the bay area locally, or the best programmer in all of Michigan remotely. What you lose by not having people locally you gain by having better people, in theory.

This applies to any locale as well. If you limit your search to only those people within driving distance of your office, you're almost guaranteed to get a lower caliber dev than if you were able to hire any dev in the world.

Most web apps are not that difficult to program. What needs the most innovation in a startup is the business model. Communicating that locally is hard enough. Remote? No thank you.

When I said "best" programmer, I meant it more holistically. That's algorithm skills, architecture skills, communication, ability to pick up new things, culture fit, etc etc.

Put that all into an imaginary 1-100 rating: you can get a 60-70 programmer in the bay area, or an 80-90 programmer remote. How many points does being local make up for? That's a question specific to your company, but if it's less than that difference in overall developer quality, remote may be a good call.

Which kind of web apps? Not everyone writes todo apps these days. One of our devs retired last week. There are probably less than 20 devs in the world with his skill set (very specialized geospatial analytics). Even todo apps can require extremely talented developers to work at scale.

Just a couple of points:

First, web apps aren't that difficult, it is true. But that doesn't stop web app startup founders from demanding only the best of the best data structure/algorithmic programmers.

Second, web apps are not even close to being the only kind of programming, suitable for remote work or not.

Work can be done remotely, but it's the extra-curricular stuff where geography counts. In-person networking, the ability to go to meetups, talks, conferences, etc.

I wonder if there is any competitive advantage to having everyone gather together in the factory, sorry, office. It seems very strange that we still cling to the idea that we have to fight our way through traffic to get to the work space when we have so many tools like Skype, Good Hangouts, etc. at our disposal.

I know of at least one startup that is quietly doing it remote. It's bucking the trend of having everyone come together. The advantage of being able to hire from anywhere instead of Bay Area is too great. We'll see if it pays off.

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