[ryanmolden]

The fact that working from home is still, relatively, rare in 2012 is baffling to me. When I think how many useful team interactions I have in a day vs. the amount of waste on meetings that either aren't necessary at all or could be more easily done via IM / e-mail it always surprises me. Of course this relies on self-managing, responsible individuals and a team with a good level of trust / communication, so perhaps that is where the fundamental difficulty lives. That and it does make it more apparent that some people aren't really required except to manage the overhead (bureaucracy) they themselves generate.

[pyre]

There is something to be said about work-life balance too. When you work from home, it's really easy to let other things distract you, because "it's ok, I'll just work more latter to make it up." Then you end up working 12 hours, because of all of the interspersed distractions. If this happens too often, then you run into issues with the barrier between work and home breaking down.

I've personally, experienced this, and I've seen people comment on HN about having experienced it too, so this isn't just a hypothetical situation.

That said, I know people that successfully work from home, and do things like have a separate office that is only for work. I was just talking with someone over the weekend about how he took a bunch of time off of work, and at the end realized that he hadn't even entered that room the entire time (emphasizing how much of a separate "I'm at work" space it was).

[ryanmolden]

Yes, it is true that working from home is not some panacea, there are simply different issues. Like all engineering, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. That said, for someone like me, who has no kids (just 2 dogs) and a g/f that works out of the home during the day, I have little to no distractions at home that I can't manage and I find I get MUCH more done, and MUCH more efficiently when working from home.

I am sure at the start of the industrial revolution there were people that complained that migrating to some remote location to work was 'unnatural' and 'full of problems' and it could never compete with someone working at 'home' (on the farm or in some small scale industry). They were both right and wrong and industrialization and centralization of the work force served a good purpose. I believe modern 'knowledge' work (I don't like that term, but whatever) again tilts the pendulum towards the 'work from wherever you prefer' kind of situation. We have ways of communicating and coordinating work even across the world. The fact that teams aren't routinely made up of members all over the world is somewhat surprising to me.

I realize there is overhead with coordination, but having essentially a 24 hour 'someone's always working' situation seems far more beneficial than 'everyone is working between the hours of 9 and 5, inclusive!!' (perhaps in two time-zones, so we have coverage approaching, but not quite reaching '24 hours'). Also coordination really isn't that big of an overhead as long as all people are professional and responsible (which, as I said before, is perhaps the bigger problem :))

Again, I am hand-waving over the complexity of how you get a team to work well in that situation. I think it takes a group of people with great respect and trust for one another, so perhaps the best idea is to work together for some period of time (say a ship cycle, a year, whatever you think is best) in a traditional setting to get those normal human bonds you form by working directly with / seeing people day in and day out, then let them scatter and continue the relationships over mail/IM/Skype/IRC/etc... if they wish.

The idea that great coders have to move geographical location to pursue some jobs in a connected world just seems very depressing to me.