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roadside_picnicHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open …

… I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever. This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.

Original discussionInstagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026458 source comments · at import
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paxysHN

Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity. During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off. Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes. Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5…

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jsightHN

Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state. Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom). But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.

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raw_anon_1111HN

Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast. Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later. Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.

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