For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

I think about these issues a lot because I run my own consultancy - I'm currently hiring freelancers 100% remotely, but as the moment to hire my first few full-time employees looms, I'm having to think very deeply about my hiring model.

I've had very positive experiences with remote work thus far, but none of the work has required outstanding creativity, it's mostly been execution. I will however need a full-time designer and a technical project manager as "captains" who pull their weight creatively and in terms of leadership, and I don't know if going 100% remote would work in this scenario.

There is another area in which I feel in-person meetings are better, and that is business development. I find I'm much more effective carrying out commercial activities - whether it's a speculative prospect meeting or a business pitch - in person that via video call.

On the other hand there are plenty of counter-examples of organizations that carry out creative, high-performance work at a decent scale: Basecamp, GitLab, Buffer, etc. I suspect we haven't seen yet a 100% remote company deliver results at hyper-scale and from scratch because the trend is novel. But large corporations - tech, banks, etc. - have had exceptional results in the last year while working remotely which suggests that it's possible to at least continue ongoing work at a very high level.

Regarding traditionally people-oriented activities, we've also seen in the last year people who have adopted remote workflows for areas like business development or fund-raising. I remember an article a few weeks back interviewing VCs and founders who claimed they were much more efficient at closing deals remotely, given the productivity gains of not having to be on the road as often.

So at the very least there is good evidence that, up to a certain scale and timeframe, 100% remote work can produce really good results.

Whether in-person work is more likely to produce ground-breaking, truly disruptive, innovations, as you claim, remains to be seen. The fact that, as of today, the vast majority of disruptive innovations have come from in-person environments does not prove that producing them remotely is not possible. And I understand why a company like Apple would not take the risk in this regard, but again, this does not prove anything.

I think the question will only be answered in time.

I have also noticed that my own productivity has skyrocketed now that im working from home and dont have the regular office distractions. I can put on music that i like myself, sit in silence while drinking coffee and think about what im currently doing and how to solve a current issue.

However! It should be noted that i do miss the office from time to time, i havent been there in 1,5 years now. And will probably visit a couple times a month in the future when things start to clear up. But i will never go back to full-time-office-work.

P.S. it should be noted that i do have a dedicated "office" room in my house which is a luxury not many have. This helps alot with working from home. Had i had to do this from my living room or my kitchen i would have not survived this mentally.

Taiwan's on a soft lockdown right now, and through g0v we've had a couple online hackathons via gather.town that went swell in my opinion, with lots of discussions and cool ideas popping around. And, a vibrant and highly active community across a huge volume of projects is maintained on the g0v slack. Off the top of my head, through online conversation only, the idea of scraping all Taiwanese hospital websites for vaccination registration information, through implementation of said app, was completed successfully. We also have the advantage of instantaneous response at nearly full capacity. That is to say, we don't need to wait until we can all get together physically to begin brainstorming and solution implementation around a given issue, such as when our COVID breakout happened and a lot of solutions arose quickly, such as translations of information, easy ways for businesses to register and print out QR code posters for our contact tracing system, and the sharing of COVID data.

I wonder if that's because there's no physical interaction whatsoever. I admit that when teams are mixed physical/non-physical, there can be information shared between physical people that the non-physical miss out on, but as others are saying, while that might seem faster, I'm not sure the added sloppiness is necessarily an advantage. In any case it seems like a very difficult thing to measure, especially when right now companies are trying to measure their productivity changes due to shifts to remote during an immensely psychologically traumatic time for everyone on earth.

Elsewhere I'm seeing further naturalist fallacy arguments, like we've "evolved" this way. I think that's a good counter to the "rugged individualistic" types that think humans would be better off living alone in the woods with a crate of beer and a shotgun or whatever, but in the far more complex social web of civilization, where you can still have social interaction but modulated to your needs, I don't think we can say "in person is better because we didn't have computers for the first 200,000 years of humanity. I'm sure one can see what else I can apply here: we also didn't have, I dunno, vaccines? Actually, better yet: we didn't have spoken language for a very, very long time, and we interacted "just fine" without it insomuch as our entire ancestral history for a couple hundred million years survived to the point where homo sapiens could finally branch off and eventually figure out complex language. Same goes for writing. So, that's kind of the problem with naturalist arguments.

Also, it takes awhile for the DNA of company to become WFH. Just sending office drones home rarely works. Ideally it would start out WFH.

Likely these big time ceos that talk about going back to the office understand all this and would prefer not to kill their company by completely changing how work is done. No doubt the pandemic was largely a set back in terms of innovation and real (ie, money making) productivity.

That said, starting up new teams as purely WFH with new hires and WFH culture is a good way to stick their toes in the water.

Don't expect immediate success, however, unless you have some senior / veteran WFH managers with a track record of excellence.

It's really a different biz. Even trickier, the products you build will likely reflect the organization and therefore seem alien compared to what you're used to.

But it's all good! Everyone is remote (one way or another) these days, so why not have a workforce that reflects that? And, after all, the probability of finding the smartest people in your timezone(+/-) within X miles of your office isn't that great, even in SV / Seattle.