I may represent a bit of survivorship bias here -- I've been fully remote for years and now own a company with a lot of contractors and employees that is also fully remote. And I'd say that companies do miss out significantly on the talent pool -- if you're hiring only those people within a 15 mile radius, versus "the world," you're restricting yourself to within a rounding error of 0 in the global talent pool.
My take is that a lot of the ideals associated with the current dev culture of "agile as the default answer" originated in the much different landscape of the late 90s, when the manifesto signatories were all helping lumbering enterprises do something different. Back then, remote work meant Citrix over a dial-up connection and cubicles and offices were flung all over sprawling enterprise complexes.
So naturally bringing everyone together in a team space for tight collaboration went well. But, at the same time, it's no longer the late 90s, and I think that the agile transformation aesthetic of physical whiteboards, painter's tape and note cards is, well, an aesthetic rather than a strategy.
Anyway, point being, I think there's a lot of misplaced inertia when it comes to organizations running experiments in remote work.
I may represent a bit of survivorship bias here -- I've been fully remote for years and now own a company with a lot of contractors and employees that is also fully remote. And I'd say that companies do miss out significantly on the talent pool -- if you're hiring only those people within a 15 mile radius, versus "the world," you're restricting yourself to within a rounding error of 0 in the global talent pool.
My take is that a lot of the ideals associated with the current dev culture of "agile as the default answer" originated in the much different landscape of the late 90s, when the manifesto signatories were all helping lumbering enterprises do something different. Back then, remote work meant Citrix over a dial-up connection and cubicles and offices were flung all over sprawling enterprise complexes.
So naturally bringing everyone together in a team space for tight collaboration went well. But, at the same time, it's no longer the late 90s, and I think that the agile transformation aesthetic of physical whiteboards, painter's tape and note cards is, well, an aesthetic rather than a strategy.
Anyway, point being, I think there's a lot of misplaced inertia when it comes to organizations running experiments in remote work.
Great take Erik and I agree :D