> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office

Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).

I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.

This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.

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raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.

Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.

Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast. You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ... Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately. Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours. So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.

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jsight 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.

Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).

But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.