We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

At JotForm, we do core development in a co-located office. But we also have two remote teams: The maintenance team and widgets team. The maintenance guys will simply work on the next most imported bug or small feature. It does not matter where they are or What time they work. They work alone. Same for the widgets team. They just maintain or create new form widgets for our users and they also work individually. This work style works well for us.

I would argue that a lot of engineering work can be done by remote teams; but defining your product, your market, your business model... all those need to be done by a team in the same location because remote working stifles creativity. All those interruptions that destroy productivity in an office are also great when you're working on a creative task - by looping a coworker into my creative process to help vet my ideas, the work product I produce as a whole is better. Inspiration strikes at all times, so it's nice to be able to just drop in on someone and discuss a topic.

Many companies reach a point where creativity isn't as important as execution; and at that point I think remote teams are appropriate. OP discovered the hard way that when you're in the ideation stage, it's hard to have a meeting of the minds unless those minds are in the same room. Again, I don't think it's about remote teams being inherently good or bad as much as they aren't appropriate in every situation.

Just having long conversations in chat tends to not be productive, but you need chat. Something like Slack is a good choice if you can't get everyone on IRC.

Somewhat still wanting for better "whiteboard simulator" type options.

Ultimately not having an office not only saves the commute, but it saves a lot of thought-cancelling interruptions. People say this is "collaboration", but usually it's just someone being noisy in another department talking about a football game, or someone repeating the required meme / pop-culture reference to hearing a word.

The advantage of having a great home office and being able to play your own music (or not to HAVE to play your own music into headphones) is pretty much priceless.

It does require hiring the right kind of folks and being able to communicate very clearly what you want.

It's especially valuable as I really believe being able to work on what you work on shouldn't be constrained based on where you live, because that's unfair to a lot of smart folks with reasons to not want to live in the half-dozen or so major tech centers. (Or someone gets bored working for the only major software company in town).

Does the entire staff of statuspage.io feel this way? Sounds like this is more of a personal issue for the author of this post. There's nothing wrong with admitting working remote didn't work for you. Maybe the title should be "Reasons working remotely is difficult for me."