[danielrhodes]

People who argue for this can't just remove body language, a huge component in how we communicate, and expect that the loss can be recovered with a better project management app. There may be short-term benefits to working remotely, but there are very few examples long-term where it has worked well. This has nothing to do with the quality of the people working together, but with the bandwidth of communication being employed. Maybe that will somehow change in the future (for everybody's benefit), but it is certainly not viable now.

[moe]

can't just remove body language, a huge component in how we communicate, and expect that the loss can be recovered with a better project management app

Since when is body language involved with getting stuff done? Or do you mean office politics and those greatly productive meeting hours?

bandwidth of communication

The lower bandwidth is more than compensated by the better signal/noise ratio.

I've found communication in remote teams to be radically more efficient than the usual office chitchat. You just don't waste time in poorly focussed meetings, adhoc exchanges that all participants have forgotten a minute later, or the infamous daily standups that give everyone the blurry feeling of being on the same page - without knowing which page that would be.

Chat is the primary communication channel in the teams that I'm participating in and the sole act of typing something out instead of saying it makes technical discussions tremendously more focussed.

It also enables a culture of meta-discussion that simply doesn't happen in old fashioned meeting-driven companies. I have many dozens of Chat-threads going on in parallel, some of which reach back months, often with long pauses. These threads contain pretty much the entire thinking that went into any given subject. Nothing is buried on funny colored post-it notes or blurry memories of long forgotten meetings.

Feel free to compare that to your "knowledge-base", "Wiki", or what have you?

certainly not viable now.

Says who?

I've been "the remote guy" exclusively for the past 5 years. For different companies, some fully distributed, some with a central office. If you want to maximize productivity of a mature team then that is your modus operandi.

[MBlume]

I might just have to file this under "holy fuck, allistic people are so weird", but...seriously?! I have to spend two hours on/walking to a train every day so that the precise way you twitch your eyebrows can properly guide my software development? Really?

[weavejester]

Given that many open source projects are developed by a distributed team, it seems to me that there are plenty of examples where this has worked well.

While face-to-face communication is perhaps the best mechanism of communication at the moment, a centralised team has a far, far smaller pool of potential hires to draw from. It's effectively a tradeoff of communication vs. talent.

My own opinion is that communication between fully distributed teams isn't that bad, and is getting better all the time. The small advantage of having a centralised team doesn't seem worth reducing your talent pool by several orders of magnitude.

[philwelch]

But there's already existence proofs of good software being developed by fully distributed teams. OK, I wouldn't want to make hiring decisions without an in-person interview, but I can't imagine how body language helps make technical decisions. In fact, I'm suspicious of people who make these types of arguments, because irrational influences like personal charisma have far more influence in person than rational influences, which are more naturally suited to written (not even spoken!) language.

[JoeAltmaier]

Bingo! That's why we created Sococo Teamspace, to make strides in capturing social signalling (expression, presence, 'over the cube wall' communication). We use it ourselves to develop Teamspace with a team distributed in 4 states, with great results.