Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

I think its also a lack of examples of companies that managed to scale up a remote dev team.

At a few companies I've worked at, remote wasn't viable due to hardware development. It was difficult and expensive to replicate test setups for remote employees when unit costs for some of these devices range from 10 to 100k USD (e.g., VNAs).

My company generally doesn't hire telecommuters. There are exceptions though.

* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site? Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.

Ad hoc meetings are 1000 times easier when everybody is in the office. Standup and other meetings are hindered by teleconferencing at best. Even with high quality video and audio, it is often much harder to hear the remote person, harder to collaborate (I can't just walk to a whiteboard and draw something up quickly and have them easily see it.)

Having them train a new hire or an intern is much harder. Furthermore, interns and new hires much prefer somebody being able to sit with them and collaborate. Sure, you can do screen sharing, but it's not the same at all.

One thing that makes our team 'special' is the culture of the team. We often do team building exercises (paintballing, curling, etc.), have optional happy hours, etc. and all of that is physically impossible without flying somebody out.

It is much harder for the remote person to get support from help-desk. If you are onsite, you walk down to one of a few different help desks and get help right away. If your hardware is faulty, you get a new laptop and are up and running within a few hours. This is not possible with somebody remote, and we've had major headaches dealing with this.

* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?

No.

* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?

I think this one is pretty hard to answer. I'd assume many potential employees pass on even applying since we don't really support remote work. I don't think I can give a proper answer here, unfortunately. I can say that we're fine with this tradeoff. We haven't had any problem attracting talent in the past (paying boatloads of money helps.)

* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?

Yes, we allow this with extenuating circumstances. We've had team/org members get sick and prefer to work from home for a few months while they recover. We've had employees leave the country to be with their parents due to illness. Employees who wanted to work from home a majority of the time while their child is young, etc. Generally we're pretty okay with short term telecommuting, but we don't really offer full time (forever) telecommuting.

Note that team members regularly WFH for a week or two while visiting home (if they don't want to take vacation), and nobody cares if you WFH once a week or two.

* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position? For example, “If a rock star in my field applied for the job, we’d do anything to get him to say Yes – including letting him work remotely.” But there can be many other answers, and I’d very much like to hear yours.

If a known rock-star (guaranteed) applied, we'd let them work remotely. If we had trouble attracting the talent we needed, we'd let them work remotely.

for whiteboarding: onenote on surfaces? (which syncs almost real-time) This is what I use, for those kind of things, as someone working remotely

I once got a remote job with a startup in Dallas, but it was a bit of an unusual circumstance where I had all the bargaining power. A friend was going in as the director of engineering and really wanted me, and I basically made being 80% remote a condition of my employment. It wound up not working out in the end largely because of that (not because of my friend, but because of executives who didn't feel like they were obligated to honor their agreement with me).