Ask HN: Anyone have a list of distributed companies (remote engineers)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone have a list of distributed companies (remote engineers)?

5 pointsbuf7 comments

It would be interesting to compare and contrast work culture and benefits of distributed teams vs fully in-house teams.

I've found a couple big players so far: Automattic: http://toni.org/2010/03/08/5-reasons-why-your-company-should-be-distributed/ Mozilla: http://jasondanielsmith.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/work-culture-differences-xerox-mozilla-and-distributed-teams/

Anyone have any they would like to contribute to this list?

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I feel that distributed teams definetly have many postives, it is just much faster to work in the same building as a person. My startup works via chat room, except for one day a week when we meet in person, and we just get so much more done.

The reason face to face is so much better for us is because so much more information is communicated via talking versus typing. Firstly, the speed one talks usually is faster than their typing speed. Second of all, information is contained in things such as tone, expressions, and gestures, none of which have a digital substitute. Furthermore, it seems that face to face contact facilitates far-reaching conversation about strategy and general topics, rather than just the code at hand. Finally, it is much easier to show someone your error message on your screen, or point to the block of code, than to copy and paste or say line numbers. That final qualm is getting better with the advent of screen sharing though.

We at Structum are all distributed. I can tell you that while building iKnode, it has been difficult. Even though we have a very async flow, there is still times where we have trouble integrating.

Google Hangouts has been great, but still, new feature planning seems to work better in-house.

Are you planning on keeping Structum distributed, or do you want to bring the team together?

Distributed works for us most of the time, so we plan to stick with it. But we are looking for ways to improve the feature planning meetings, which is our major pain point. We usually use the white board a lot, and using virtual whiteboards is not as easy.

So we have thought about three possible ways so far:

1) Making Planning meetings only for major versions only and meet face to face for it in a central location. (This involves traveling).

2) Remove planning meetings all together. Focus on small features and no planning. (Not likely. Being remote requires us to at least sit down and talk about the future.)

3) Invest in better teleconference technologies to improve the interaction between us.(Very expensive, but maybe worth it.)

To be honest, I am looking to #3. I still don't know if it is going to improve the flow though. We are also looking for ways to change the way we work to make those feature planning meetings a lot more interactive using technology only.

I am wondering why you would need expensive equipment to teleconference effectively. Aren't there all kinds of web based options you could explore?

I'm pretty sure DeviantArt is.

Yes it is.

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