[dasil003]

Very interesting food for thought here, but the difficulties of remote engineering are not fundamentally any more challenging than any other collaboration obstacles. Obviously having all the stakeholders sitting in the same room is the platonic ideal of a team, but to me this is a secondary concern after getting the absolute best people we can.

I think the author is a bit out of touch with how startups operate. Personally I'll take a crack team made up of five best people sitting in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Bangalore and Tokyo over a special team with a powerful corporate mandate ensconced in Microsoft's Redmond campus.

If everyone is good at what they do and has their eye on the ball, then communication can be managed from anywhere, but if you're dealing with the political reality of operating in a major corporation then you need all the help you can get.

[randomfool]

Agree. It's interesting to compare the remote worker debate with the open office configuration debate- they seem like different degrees of the same problem.

I find it interesting that I myself am all for remote workers, but have had nothing but horrible experiences with workplaces where everyone has their own office. Pondering this a bit I think it's because every workplace I've been in with individual offices (Microsoft and others) also seemed to be very old school in terms of communication software.

[desdiv]

Could you please elaborate a bit on what sorts of horrible experiences you had with the individual offices arrangement? How frequent were your team meetings? Did you guys use Slack-style chat softwares?