Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

"...But I don't see a reason why, in 2013, given the tools we have, a developer has to be on-site at a desk every day, as the normal operating procedure..."

I am struggling with this same question, but from the other side. I help teams become more Agile, and I'm a startup junkie, so all I care about is performance here. I want to know what works best in terms of product quality and pivot ability.

And guess what? So far it's co-located teams that kick ass over distributed teams. I wish it wasn't so, and I'd love to hang back in my home office and work, but that's not the way the numbers are looking.

To be more precise, yes, you can become a "commodity" programmer, that is, somebody that people slide a list under the door to and who delivers code on a regular basis. In this case you are competing with commodity programmers around the world who are willing to work for peanuts. If that's your thing, hop on over to one of the programming job sites and have fun with it.

Now I can already hear the objections. With all these tools, why can't I be just as plugged in as if I were in the office? Aren't you making a false dichotomy, asking us to either be on-site or completely on our own?

Yes, I am generalizing. Look, I don't know why the tools don't work to do the things they are supposed to do. Certainly we have chat, VOIP, and all kinds of awesome communication tools. You'd think that would be enough. But it's not. Instead of powerfully performing teams we get mediocrity.

I suspect that software development has a powerful social and human aspect that is not replaced by tools. Working in a team isn't just trading streams of data across a wire. It's going out to lunch, having a beer while talking about work, or making an oddball suggestion one Wednesday afternoon that turns out to change how everybody thinks of the problem they're working on.

So sign me up for remote work too. Just show me how it's going to be as effective as co-located teams. I see a lot of fluff from places like 37Signals who make a marketing strategy out of being so aweseome, but I'm not seeing results in the real world. I hope to learn more -- and I hope this problem gets solved.

I'd contend that the tools just aren't there.

When I want to chat with someone, I want to do it instantly, like walking up to someone in the office. The Skype concept of "dialing" someone is old, antiquated and feels... laggy.

There was a video chat client promoted on Hacker News a while back that allowed for instantly initiating a video chat session with a colleague.

Sococo, a distributed agile client (with video support) also claims to do the same thing, allows for you to instantly create a video session with anyone in your virtual office.

IM works because it's immediate. Video chatting must be the same in order for a distributed team to work.

The tools aren't there yet.

Just leave the video conference software on. I'm working on an agile project with a distributed team and it works well once people realize that working in front of a live camera isn't any big deal.

An important factor is team cohesion and trust. In a fully distributed team, trust is immensely important because you can't just look out at the warroom and see who is "crushing it".

You have to have a team that can come together in ways other than having a beer every Friday. Sometimes this is accomplished by having a once per quarter, or twice per year, or even once per year gathering. Those are generally good times for team building activities, not just commits.

Having non-work interactions with your other co-workers can also be helpful. Something as silly as firing up a Quake server or playing Halo together can make a difference.

Also, you cannot expect to apply standard management approaches in a distributed team environment. It can be a struggle because you have to find a new way to evaluate the contributions of your various team members. I think that this is actually where most distributed teams fall apart. Managers simply aren't trained for this environment.

I'm generally not interested in hiring remote workers at our company. While it can work in rare cases (where the need for collaboration is low) it is much more the exception than the rule for us. Our company culture and structure is based around trust and collaboration. We allow VPN/remote work, but as a tradeoff. For the most part, our employees are local and have a desk in the office that they spend most of their time in. I agree that in some cases working from home offers a greater opportunity for focus and freedom from distraction. But for that case we have VPN. The rest of the time everyone benefits from closer collaboration.

For what it's worth we have done several experiments. We even tried having a remote worker on a constant skype connection, with a monitor/camera in a shared office with other workers (over a period of several months). Based on our data I would say that there is a measurable decline in value when a person shifts to >50% remote work in our environment. That may not be true for other environments of course.

> For what it's worth we have done several experiments. We even tried having a remote worker on a constant skype connection, with a monitor/camera in a shared office with other workers (over a period of several months).

Did this help things at all?

It was definitely a noticeable improvement over remote with just email / phone communication (and occasional trips to the office), but easily not as good as being there.

> And guess what? So far it's co-located teams that kick ass over distributed teams.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you have any specific data points you can share?

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