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by dang 4195 days ago
The article assumes its conclusion:

> amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline

That's a huge claim, and it's disputable. For example, I've worked both ways a lot and find remote work to be dramatically less effective.

If you accept the claim, then sure, the startups PG was writing about are missing the obvious, and for the most ironic of reasons—technical backwardness. That's possible. But there's also a lot of wishful thinking and saying-makes-it-so on this subject, which comes up on HN all the time. A lot of people just really, really want this to be true. That alone doesn't make it true, and I think it's at least as possible that desire is distorting the analysis. (Which, as someone whose whole career has been plagued by an unsolvable constraint problem of family, work, and geography, I can easily understand.)

Fortunately, we're going to find out. If all those startups are doing it wrong, then there's a gigantic market inefficiency and we'll soon see a new wave of smarter, less backward companies doing much better.

1 comments

What you say about the article may very well be true, but the surrounding discussion is not as bad as that. I recognize that the problems pointed out by PG ("chance meetings") and others are genuine problems that haven't yet been solved by technology. However, what I object to is that the rallying cry (and a lot of PG's essays are now rallying cries for how the industry should be, even if he just thinks "I'm just a dude that likes to post my thoughts on the internet, I don't know why everyone objects") of the industry is "move more people into open offices in SV and NYC", rather than "improve the remoting process".
Twitter = chance meetings as a platform.