My team at Stripe was scattered all over, during COVID our company was fully remote, and prior to that I worked remotely on a presidential campaign. All of those were great experiences and, in their own ways, necessarily/understandably remote.
Compared to the early days at Gusto and my own startup, though, in-person has very real benefits that (in my opinion) are worth the challenges in hiring. I don’t know that it will always be true and can’t rule out that we’re wrong.
Having internal users and domain experts there in person makes a huge difference. It’s not impossible to do remotely, and maybe the tradeoff doesn’t make sense forever, but it’s worked well thus far.
I’ve felt similarly. In-person has benefits, but across my career it’s been easier to assemble top-tier teams when hiring remote than in-person.
For myself, I’m past the point of moving for companies. If they happen to be nearby I’ll make it work. If they’re not nearby, its either remote or I’m not at all interested anymore.
I, personally, haven't found many situations where continuous in-person-ness is required for hardware-free, software companies, when the actual 1:1 time necessary to get requirements / etc exceed an hour or so at a time and couldn't be as efficiently done over a Zoom call.
There are obviously huge, huge exceptions to this the moment you add hardware to the situation; or you need something you can't replicate well with screen-sharing.
Addendum: but I'm also mildly frustrated because it's a type of work I would be interested in; but I'm on the other coast, so I can't easily apply :)
My team at Stripe was scattered all over, during COVID our company was fully remote, and prior to that I worked remotely on a presidential campaign. All of those were great experiences and, in their own ways, necessarily/understandably remote.
Compared to the early days at Gusto and my own startup, though, in-person has very real benefits that (in my opinion) are worth the challenges in hiring. I don’t know that it will always be true and can’t rule out that we’re wrong.
Having internal users and domain experts there in person makes a huge difference. It’s not impossible to do remotely, and maybe the tradeoff doesn’t make sense forever, but it’s worked well thus far.