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Comment by kethinov | Hacker News Reader

I know you're just trying to build the best team you can, but in the interest of full disclosure every time I see someone say something like, "in the office where they can interact with others with less friction," all I see is "our team is bad at working remotely."

If you see remote as something that causes friction, I'd recommend looking at teams that swear by it reducing friction (like the friction of noisy offices and unnecessary commutes) and checking out the techniques they use to make it work so well.

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Not every company is a good fit for every developer. For instance: I probably wouldn't like working at Valve. I do not however extrapolate that no company should be organized like Valve, simply because I wouldn't like it there. I am happy that there are companies like Valve that work well for the kind of people who are compatible with Valve, and companies like Matasano that work well for the sort of people who want to collaborate in person with a small, tight-knit group of peers and across the net with a larger group.

Gingerly, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that "incompatible with HN user 'kethinov" is not quite the dealbreaking deficit you're giving the impression that it is.

If you'd like to do appsec work remote, let me suggest Accuvant, Leviathan, and IOActive as alternatives. All three have remote teams. In fact, I believe everyone on the pentest team at Accuvant is remote. You never have to interact with your coworkers in person there at all.

We're not talking about subjective stuff like company culture, we're talking about factually disprovable statements like "you need to be in a physical office to collaborate effectively." That's an objectively false statement and it's irritating to see so many people repeat it.

I don't think either of the posts you've replied to in this thread state that all employees at all companies require physical proximity to collaborate effectively. Just that Matasano (by virtue of its leadership) prefers proximity.

It's entirely reasonable that some people prefer proximity over remote arrangements. People who don't aren't likely to enjoy working at Matasano. That doesn't negate the existence of other perfectly good options for them, as tptacek pointed out.

You don't think that "we prefer folks to be in the office where they can interact with others with less friction" is stating a requirement of physical proximity to collaborate effectively? That's how I read it.

Again: I'm assuming you're this invested in the thread because you really like the idea of working for an appsec firm. I don't blame you! Appsec is an awesome field to work in. I think you'd be much happier talking to Accuvant, which runs an all-remote team, than in trying to talk Matasano out of a carefully-made decision that is a core part of its culture.

I'm interested in this thread because it had so many instances of unstated premises hostile to remote work and I felt someone should say something to set the record straight.

It saddens me that you chose to ignore the substance of my argument and focus on visiting my intentions instead.

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