Why would you chase people from Universities who have high salary expectations when you have the internet? It is beyond me. Developers storm remote positions, yet the industry is super slow with adoption.
I realize these aren't controlled experiments, but consider two sources:
1) Alistair Cockburn has a communication chart [0] suggesting that face-to-face at a whiteboard is the most effective form of communication. He's been showing the chart for at least a decade, to rooms full of engineers from all the big players and lots of little players. If he were wrong, he'd eventually run out of consulting clients, but that hasn't happened. I realize this is a weak argument.
2) YCombinator co-locates its funded teams. I'd wager they're familiar with the arguments for and against remote work, that they're technology savvy, that they're data-driven, and they're incentivized to get the most for their money. I realize that this second argument is the same as my first, but I think these arguments should make you think about why they put a premium on in-person collaboration.
I don't doubt that the parent wasn't being absolutely comprehensive in the scope of their answer, but surely you appreciate that direct communication in person is.. well, at the very least 'efficient'?
I can't believe you're actually wanting a source for this, lol
> but surely you appreciate that direct communication in person is.. well, at the very least 'efficient'?
No, I don't. I believe written communication is far more efficient. Cavemen talk. Writing is the greatest technology we've ever invented. Forget all your latest devops crazes, you can't do anything useful without writing.
> I believe written communication is far more efficient.
Categorically wrong. Two examples:
1) Years ago I was moving out of a shared house and looking for someone to move into my room. One person in particular would only communicate via email about coming to view the room. Consequently days elapsed before we'd got a final arrangement that could have been sorted out with a 10 minute phone call, despite having my number, and me having theirs. Then, when I took half a day off to wait in for this person to visit, they missed the appointment. When I checked my email it turned out they'd emailed me a few minutes before they were due to turn up to tell me they weren't going to make it. Again, despite having my phone number. Already irritated by their behaviour this obviously left me fuming.
2) Just the past few days I've been dealing with an "urgent" support incident where the two people involved have been exchanging emails for three days: a conversation that could be easily accelerated with a call.
In both these cases direct synchronous communication is the key: this might be face to face or on the phone, or a video call, but in no way is written communication more efficient.
I disagree. Yesterday I was trying to organise a visit to a luthier for a guitar repair. He told me to phone him, so I phoned, he didn't answer. I left a voicemail, and he phoned me back 15 minutes later, I missed him. On the third attempt, we spoke. I explained what I had written in the email, and he told me that I should call in with the guitar. Overall, it took ~20 minutes of back and forth to resolve an issue that could have been answered in the reply where he told me to phone him.
If you phone me, you are likely to call me at an inconvenient time and interrupt what I'm doing. If you send me an email, and I'm free, I'll respond immediately. If I'm in the middle of something, I'll respond when I'm finished what I'm doing.
Look, I work alone and find some situations best described by writing down long and comprehensive emails - but if you're going to accuse face-to-face contact as being 'caveman talk' I'm sorry but I'm going to wonder if your empathic or social intelligence is somehow dialled down.
My life experience tells me that there are vast tracts of productivity that are served very well by direct collaboration with other humans.
> accuse face-to-face contact as being 'caveman talk'
I said it's caveman technology, which is surely indisputable. In my experience it's thoroughly inefficient for discussing technical matters. That's probably why not much technology was developed before writing.
Writing is great for one-way communication. If you actually mean to collaborate, if you don't know what you don't know and what to ask the other person, in-person communication is way more efficient.
And it turns out if you're solving nontrivial problems as a software team, you're talking is more of the collaborative kind than the one-way-information-distributing kind.
I'm not trying to argue or convince anybody, just answering the question from the HR perspective (I spend ~20% of my time hiring engineers in a large multinational company). Every large company has internal data overwhelmingly showing that you want to jam as many people in one place as possible. Of course there's physical limits (real estate, talent pools, cost of living), so you are constantly making a trade-off between paying a premium (more rent, higher salary) vs hiring remote workers who are cheaper but produce less on average. That's just how it works.