I mean, that’s simply not true. At a most basic level, if you’re going to collaborate effectively as part of a team for a long period of time then you need to realistically be ± 3 time zones at most.
That's only true if you're working entirely or mostly synchronously, which might be an indicator of inherent anti-patterns in your work culture and processes, e.g., lots of meetings instead of written documentation.
Still, it's the environment that is broken. Hence, it's the environment that needs to be fixed.
Having people relocate to another country, because your organization isn't able to fix its own internal problems, means you're simply outsourcing your own costs to your employees.
George Bernard Shaw comes to mind here: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Reality being as it is, is no argument for not trying to be better or improve a situation:
Contrary to the Shaw quote above I’d say that simply resigning oneself to reality as it is and therefore precluding better approaches is the unreasonable choice.
It seems you are working in a very niche area where most of the work is entirely asynchronous. In my area of work (non-trivial software development), there is a wide consensus that some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis. My company has fully embraced remote work, is going through an economic down turn like many other "growth startups" and yet finds it necessary to mandate meeting hours where everyone has to be present or to organize offsites where people can meet and get to know each other in a better way.
> some in-person collaboration is needed on a regular basis
I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.
That said, poster child remote-first companies such as Basecamp, GitLab, or Zapier have their people gather a few times throughout the year, too, to allow them to get to know each other better. That's not a contradiction at all and something entirely different than mandating people move to specific location to work there the entire time.
> I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.
I'd say burden of proof is on you to provide any data that remote work is equally good.
I have given remote-working a shot for three years - first ~1.5 were mandatory during COVID and last ~1.5 were during normal times. My company has gone all in on remote work and has tried to make it work. It just doesn't work and everyone is openly admitting its flaws. To name a few: a lack of trust, very shallow relationships, struggles for junior and new team members to ramp up, a lack of engagement etc.
Based on my personal experience and that of my social and professional circles, >80% people seem to prefer a hybrid model where they work 2-3 days in office and 2-3 days at home. Of course, in-office days have to be mandated for the entire team to be effective.
This question seems to imply that junior engineers require lots of synchronous, in-person meetings and handholding.
Is there any proof that's truly the case? Or isn't that yet another one of those commonly accepted, yet rarely questioned truisms when it comes to - an often dysfunctional - work culture?
Not the OP but the proof is my own experience in both in-office and remote settings. And everyone is going to go by their own life experiences. If enough people think that remote setting sucks and that junior engineers, along with many other roles, are more effective in person, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that's not the case.
Well, there are entirely distributed, remote-first companies like Automattic, Zapier, GitLab, or Basecamp. I'm certain each of those also employs junior engineers.
Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case:
Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?
Or is it rather that the company in question itself has an underlying organizational problem?
> Well, there are entirely distributed, remote-first companies like Automattic, Zapier, GitLab, or Basecamp. I'm certain each of those also employs junior engineers.
Yes. My company is also in that category. We employ a lot of junior engineers too. >90% of them say they want some in-person interaction because it is hard to ramp up effectively on a complex codebase and a different culture.
> Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case
Because we are all humans and in absence of an in-person presence, we are not able to form trusting deep relationships.
> Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?
countless remote teams have faced this problem. it's a trade-off, of course, but it's not an insurmountable challenge.
for example we are using gather.town. much better than Google Meet (full HD screen sharing, ad-hoc breakout sessions, blablabla, free under team size of 25, if I remember correctly)
While in most organizations pair programming probably is far less common than pointless meetings, even then it's preferable to document the outcomes of pair programming sessions, so others can benefit from those results without having to have been there synchronously or in person.
