The commute doesn’t help you, but working in an office next to your team mates will accelerate your work.

Software development is a team sport and individual productivity is not the same as team productivity. Communication bandwidth in person is much higher when colocated. Startups move fast and higher bandwidth increases velocity, reduces errors, improves quality and team cohesion.

For other situations remote can be “good enough”, and has advantages eg bigger recruitment pool or cheaper labour, but in general in person is just going to be a lot faster with higher quality results.

A lot of engineers don’t wish this to be true, because wfh is often better for them as individuals, but it is what it is.

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klardotsh 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve worked in plenty of startups (the overwhelming majority of my career, actually) and did not perceive the performance of in-office teams to be significantly better than the remote teams I’ve been on. The floor is probably lower for remote teams (in that ineffective remote teams are horribly ineffective), but the ceiling is comparable, and the average is (again, in my experience) anywhere from comparable to slightly better, because folks are working the ways+hours they’re most effective, not what someone else thinks should be the most effective.

	▲	Spooky23 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it depends on your job role. I’m more architecture and operations in past lives, and being together is really powerful and reduces time taken for many tasks. If you’re an engineer or developer mostly working a backlog, totally different story - wherever you are most comfortable working is ideal. Either way, dogma is terrible. I have a friend who is a specialist in a specific area of finance who has been WFH for 20 years. Now she’s commuting to an office in a city about 300 miles away from the rest of her team, because the big boss says come to the office.

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copperroof 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use this kind of opinion as my idiot bat signal now. It’s so obviously untrue when someone starts spouting this nonsense you know they are a very feelings based decision maker.

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snoman 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I have been leaning the other way. There’s room for nuance in the discussion but a stance of certainty that full remote is just more effective screams “expert beginner.”

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christophilus 13 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s a third option: some people work best alone / remote. Some people work best in an office.

	▲	snoman 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There’s more than 3 options. That’s what the nuance is about. Sometimes individual productivity isn’t even the measure of success and sometimes it needs to be sacrificed for group productivity.
	▲	rhubarbtree 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> some people work best alone / remote. Some people work best in an office. this is true, and irrelevant to my reasoning.

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mattbuilds 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Got any evidence of this or is just vibes based?

	▲	rhubarbtree 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unsure why the status quo needs evidence but remote doesn't, but which part of my reasoning do you require evidence to believe?