I'm a senior UI developer for a Yorkshire-based company (IAM Cloud, check them out) and my role is almost entirely fully remote. I generally pop in...
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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
The biggest problem with remoting is that it becomes more problematic in companies that are secretive and piece feed project details, so if the management is broken then remoting is less easy to maintain. I have seen more problems in a company that treated one location as the development resource with management in the other office. On occasions where I worked remotely on some projects with friends, or collaborated on opensource git projects with people I have never met it normally worked much better than when I worked in noisy offices. Often I prefer to work in an office because if no progress is made your atleast seen to be working, when you work remotely it's much harder because you normally need to twice as productive and end up putting more physical hours.
Good insight and I agree. Fundamentally it involves a shift in company approach and culture and you’re right, transparency is key.
Well balanced article, good read!
I never see the people on my team despite the fact that we're all in the same building.