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Comment by a2kadet | Hacker News Reader

>If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue.

I would say I'm pretty against distributed teams at the moment. Would you mind elaborating on the value of them?

Assuming this is a serious question, you can hire whoever you want without worrying about their location. The world is your talent pool.

Or to put it another way, almost every recruiter e-mail I respond to states that I am not interested in relocating (usually to the bay area). Requiring all of your employees to sit in the same building is not just old fashioned, it misses out on talent that chooses to live elsewhere.

The other big one is that the company can save a lot of money on office space. If necessary, a small HQ can still be located in San Francisco or Silicon Valley for physical proximity to investors, but you don't need to worry about getting a big, fancy and expensive space to house all your workers. For a funded startup, this means the burn rate is a lot lower. For a bootstrapped company, it just means the company has a lot more money to spend elsewhere or save; they could even roll the savings into higher salaries to attract better talent (which fits with your point as well).

You're never going to have to worry about whether you need an open floorplan or not, because by default everybody gets a custom-designed private office.

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