Or simply put: if you truly want the best, most focused, highly performing team, an office requirement shrinks your talent pool tremendously for extremely little gain. Do quarterly meetups somewhere and move on, IMO.
Software development is a team sport and individual productivity is not the same as team productivity. Communication bandwidth in person is much higher when colocated. Startups move fast and higher bandwidth increases velocity, reduces errors, improves quality and team cohesion.
For other situations remote can be “good enough”, and has advantages eg bigger recruitment pool or cheaper labour, but in general in person is just going to be a lot faster with higher quality results.
A lot of engineers don’t wish this to be true, because wfh is often better for them as individuals, but it is what it is.
I used to work in an environment with often 8 hours of meetings straight. People had their headsets on while being in meetings and were simultaneously programming and when they heard their name mentioned they tried to say something smart. It was a terribly inefficient way to work.
Then I switched to an environment where we took "Almost no meetings" seriously and it was a tremendous boost. After a year or so I realized that we left a lot of potential efficiency untapped because of lack of communication or miss-communication.
Now I think there must be a middle ground - an optimum of communication for an optimum of efficiency. Teams need to be actively steered to that, just hiring good communicators and hoping for the best is probably not going to work. You need meetings. At least some. And some seemingly inefficient meetings will prevent inefficiency elsewhere.
Everything I wrote above was about highly distributed teams working remotely. The Tiny Teams Playbook has also
"In Person: either have an office, or VERY frequent AirBnB hack weeks"
in it, which changes things quite a bit.
Ideas, concepts, implementation plans are first written down as a proposal, which is read by others and discussed online. Meetings are only required if there are blockers to resolve, or differences in opinion.
Or, alternatively, respect personal boundaries and don't force coworkers to have social outings.
I really wish "work is just work" was more popular. There is an empathetic way to do this that isn't just treating people as a number but also not forcing socializing outside of the context of work.
Yes to avoiding burnout. No to thinking a retreat is the answer to that.
Have an onsite team or have hybrid setups that bring people within geographic areas together. Nothing replaces getting around a physical whiteboard in a physical space.
Context is in the original statement that retreats are a fix for burnout.
monadoid•2h ago
hshdhdhehd•1h ago