
How Paul Graham Is Wrong - kaws
http://ma.tt/2014/12/how-paul-graham-is-wrong/
======
jasode
>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the
amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as
previous generations of company did offline.

I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest
here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are
_not as effective_ as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes, they
do help mitigate many issues of isolation and they do help collaboration but
there's still some "bandwidth loss" when people are not in the same room or
even down the hall from each other.

I'm not advocating an open floor plan with noise and distractions. Even a set
of private offices that share a common corridor to facilitate spontaneous
conversation with a side conference room for group brainstorming, is superior
to keeping Skype windows open.

Yes, there are the common examples of virtual remote workers at basecamp,
Automattic, github etc. Those are not billion dollar companies. A lot of
startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't
compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this
has ever been successfully done. Small scale modest businesses, yes, but not
big ones.

Maybe you can hire a 5-person 100% remote team to launch a new web magazine.
Journalists and editors by their nature seem to fit the remote work paradigm
quite nicely. At first glance, it seems programming also fits, but only for
modest projects.

Yes, the remote workers themselves will insist "I'm 100% just as effective
offsite as onsite -- in fact, I'm more productive because I'm not interrupted
by office nonsense." No doubt they feel that way but _the whole team_ isn't
more effective.

Remote workers even with today's fanciest collaboration technology is not the
answer to finding the best talent.

~~~
falcolas
As another veteran of working remotely, I disagree. Conscious use of
collaboration tools offsets not being in the same office together nicely. Real
time communication via Hangouts or Skype are at a level where you can hold a
good conversation without having to be in the same physical location.

Also, most offices (and businesses) are not really built to support proper
collaboration and working conditions. As an example, due to a recent job move,
I'm stuck in an office 80% of the time right now, and it's pretty miserable.
It's an open office plan so there's constant noise and visual distractions, my
boss can (and does) come over and interrupt me constantly on issues completely
unrelated to my work, and in a former life the office was a welding garage, so
I'm pretty cold most days this winter.

I hear of the unicorn offices, where they were built to support collaboration
and focused development work, but I've always found reality has more in common
with Dilbert than Valve.

~~~
timr
Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one)
generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So
yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan
the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration,
and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk
about the benefits of in-person work.

Programmers tend to want to squirrel themselves away and work on stuff to
maximize their own personal productivity, whereas _organizations_ want to get
a bunch of people working at a _group optimum_. That means that every
individual takes a productivity hit for communication purposes, but that the
organizational output is much higher than any individual could achieve. Hence,
we get the fruitless debates about working conditions: what you see as
interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the
most globally productive use of your time.

There's definitely a fine line between communication and distraction and it's
hard to hit the balance (I've worked in some horrible "open-plan" environments
too), but in my experience, programmers nearly always err on the side of too
little communication, especially early in their career.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group
optimum.

It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely
realistic as a goal.

The _appearance_ of productivity is usually far more important than the
reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant
outputs are primate status plays and politics.

>what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you
work for, be the most globally productive use of your time.

I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer
out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful
productivity.

No sane manager is going to want to do that without a _really_ good reason.

>programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication

That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small,
relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and
code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise.

The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and
too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work
without constant supervision.

It's a management issue, not a programmer issue.

I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write
a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to
become the new outsourcing. Because cheap.

But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for
a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being
disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US.

If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move
somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley
when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere?

Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is
_essential_ to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet?

Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters
aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.

~~~
timr
Pretty much nothing you've written here refutes what I'm saying. You're a
programmer, so naturally, you assume that your optimal use is programming, and
you draw conclusions starting from that assumption. But if you _moderate_ that
assumption a bit (you're also well-used as a planner, an organizer and as a
communicator, among other things), you arrive at a different set of
conclusions.

 _" The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the
reality"_

No, that's just cynicism talking. Larger organizations care about your
personal productivity, but they care _less_ than small organizations. Part of
the brilliance of modern corporations is that you don't always have to be at
peak productivity as an individual in order for the company to profit. Which
means, in turn, that you can do things like get sick or have a family without
having to give up your job. The flip side of feeling less efficient is that
you have some cushion when you actually _are_ less efficient.

 _" I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a
programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of
useful productivity."_

You obviously don't want to interrupt someone gratuitously, but the point is
that _your_ perspective on what's important can differ wildly from your
_employer 's_ perspective. Keeping someone in "The Zone" is not the only goal.
An employee in "The Zone" who is churning out "The Wrong Thing" is worse than
no employee at all. So you need communication. And as soon as you need
communication overhead, people are going to be interrupted. It's a cost of
doing business.

------
drawkbox
Programmers, if they have a choice, like remote or at least some remote.

Managers + VCs, if they have a choice, prefer all in the office so they can
keep power but this actually makes them less competitive and more susceptible
to physical disruptions: moving an office, an employee moving, time, office
politics, commute, distractions, over meeting and more.

The PG essay on this was glaringly overlooking that you can be a US based
programmer and be good or great even if you aren't in SF. Tech companies have
a responsibility to not be so monoculture and they currently have a single
point of failure in Silicon Valley, which from an engineering perspective is
poor distributed design and very little redundancy.

There are benefits of being in one place, the ability to meet physically and
be on the same page but we all know the real work gets done back at our desks
in our solitary focused modes when it comes to programming and making
products. Then we open up for feedback and iteration, then again back to work.

The work part should be setup so programmers perform their best. Just like
some of the best scientists, writers, etc, they need their lab/office where
they can get somewhere with the problem at hand, not an open office in SF.

Glad Ma.tt mentioned this as he is a leader in the right kind of tech
leadership we need: spread it around, live better, work hard, deliver solid
products, from anywhere...

~~~
ha292
I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is
brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims
that "mean people fail".

The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the
inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions.

Time to get out of the bubble.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
Part of the problem is that investors might understand the businesses they
invest in from 30,000 feet, but they frequently have no idea how their
portfolio companies are actually run. If some of them went undercover and
applied for jobs at their own portfolio companies, they'd probably have a
different perspective about the "talent shortage."

~~~
onedev
They'd probably get rejected for jobs at their own portfolio companies. That's
how out of whack hiring is.

~~~
gaius
Not sure why you're down voted, graduation year alone would get all VCs fall
at the first reading of their CVs.

------
btilly
Meh. Here is the tradeoff.

If everyone is co-located, you have inconvenience and higher productivity. If
everyone is remote, you have an inherent overhead, but enormous flexibility.
If some people are co-located and others are remote, you naturally tend
towards a divide where people who are co-located without thinking about it
wind up networking with each other and excluding the remotes.

If you are a small startup, the productivity difference really can be the
margin between success and failure. Hence the pressure to co-locate. But
conversely the availability of better talent in theory can allow for a better
workforce which might outweigh the productivity overhead of remote work. But
when there are just founders, by definition you can't assume that there are
better people available. And the need for close working at the initial stages
gives strong pressure to co-locate.

Therefore there is a natural tendency for startups to co-locate. And once the
seed of the company is co-located, switching to a remote model is going to
involve crossing a difficult cultural barrier that not everyone will succeed
in. Thus the continuing pressure to co-locate.

~~~
snird
I think you might be mistaken in the assumption that remote working leads to
less productivity than co-located.

This is purely up to the team. Sometimes being co-located leads to over
meeting and lots of time spent on disruptions and chats, while remote working
lead you to be more professional and talk to your co-workers only when
necessary for the job.

~~~
btilly
I think my assumption is justified. To address your suggestion, it is safe to
say tht early stage startups which are inclined to over meeting are guaranteed
failures no matter what.

------
dang
The article assumes its conclusion:

> amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as
> previous generations of company did offline

That's a huge claim, and it's disputable. For example, I've worked both ways a
lot and find remote work to be dramatically less effective.

If you accept the claim, then sure, the startups PG was writing about are
missing the obvious, and for the most ironic of reasons—technical
backwardness. That's possible. But there's also a lot of wishful thinking and
saying-makes-it-so on this subject, which comes up on HN all the time. A lot
of people just really, really want this to be true. That alone doesn't make it
true, and I think it's at least as possible that desire is distorting the
analysis. (Which, as someone whose whole career has been plagued by an
unsolvable constraint problem of family, work, and geography, I can easily
understand.)

Fortunately, we're going to find out. If all those startups are doing it
wrong, then there's a gigantic market inefficiency and we'll soon see a new
wave of smarter, less backward companies doing much better.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
What you say about the article may very well be true, but the surrounding
discussion is not as bad as that. I recognize that the problems pointed out by
PG ("chance meetings") and others are genuine problems that haven't yet been
solved by technology. However, what I object to is that the rallying cry (and
a lot of PG's essays are now rallying cries for how the industry should be,
even if he just thinks "I'm just a dude that likes to post my thoughts on the
internet, I don't know why everyone objects") of the industry is "move more
people into open offices in SV and NYC", rather than "improve the remoting
process".

~~~
aredridel
Twitter = chance meetings as a platform.

------
mcfunley
I just finished a remote job search. I'm in Los Angeles, and most of the
companies I talked to were in SF. I had previously worked remotely for a
company in New York (Etsy), and I was honestly really surprised how hostile SF
companies were to the idea. I was mostly going through personal connections,
so I assume that I was getting the gigantic break of having a solid
recommendation that most people can't get. (I feel bad about this, but it is
what it is.)

I have been on both sides of remote work, so I totally get that it's not a
slam dunk. It works a lot better for companies that have a strong culture
established in a home base, and it works a lot better for experienced folks
than green college hires. I have shut down the interview process myself when I
felt like working remotely wouldn't work out at particular companies.

Even given all of that, I was pretty amazed how quickly some of the
conversations got shut down. No remotes, we don't care who you are or what
your experience is. I didn't talk to any companies outside of SF that were
that quick to say no.

FWIW I landed at Stripe, which in fairness is probably one of the companies pg
had in mind when writing his original article. I agree with the spirit of
this, and I also don't really agree with a lot of things in pg's essay. But
the particulars here might be totally wrong. At least one company in his
network is really remote friendly.

~~~
massimosgrelli
How does remote working get done at Stripe? what tools? What practices are a
consolidated standard? It would be really useful to the discussion if you
could share something with us.

------
smtddr
I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent
shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I've
made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a
BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose,
Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the
"out-of-reach"'ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air
is located, and the Persidio... we'd would be having a very different
conversation.

In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big
part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my
Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station.
Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART
situation.

~~~
wavefunction
I don't know if I'm one of the great engineers PG and others are talking about
but I have no interest in living in the Bay area, whether as it currently
exists or with even more people.

You can solve the "transportation" issue by avoiding having to transport
anyone in the first place, which is exactly what the author is speaking to
when they suggest remote working arrangements.

~~~
mgkimsal
Or maybe even transporting some of those opportunities to areas closer to you.
Starting new VC-backed companies in Detroit, Denver, Boston, Durham, Austin,
Memphis, Nashville, Louisville or other regions would give you access to some
great talent that simply prefers to live in other areas of the country.

For an industry that often derides 'monoculture', the SF tech scene sure
resembles one.

------
tessierashpool
PG ignored current trends and recent history to an absurd degree in his recent
blog post.

Not factored into the equation: An actual, provable, verifiable history of
illegal salary-fixing. The experiential reality that most immigrant
programmers get a lot of mistreatment, both from racism and from their own
incompetence - and the related experiential fact that a lot of immigrant
programmers are utterly incompetent.

The rhetoric of these arguments talks about 10x programmers, but companies
really seem to prefer importing 0.1x programmers or even -10x programmers.

Meanwhile, tons of companies have immense success with remote work, and the
wage changes associated with the last ten years are not at all commensurate
with the increased value of programming work. (See aforementioned illegal
salary-fixing.)

Is remote work easy? No. But is PG's business about doing easy things? No.

I literally just ran grep -c "table" against a text dump of this comments
page. The count was 122. 122 uses of the table tag. Since that includes
</table>, 61 tables.

This whole argument is as up-to-date as the HTML on this page.

------
untothebreach
So much this. I have pretty much stopped clicking on the HN posts from HN
companies looking for employees, because almost none of them offer remote
work. Which is too bad, because there are quite a few HN companies that I
would love to work for.

~~~
ryanSrich
I highly suspect that it's a consequence of being a YC company. The president
of YC has even publicly denounced allowing remote work.

> As a side note, avoid remote employees in the early days. As a culture is
> still gelling, it’s important to have everyone in the same building. [1]

1\. [http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire](http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-
hire)

~~~
lsaferite
Seems like setting yourself up to have an 'everyone is remote' culture at that
point in time would make the most sense.

~~~
ryanSrich
That makes the most sense to me as well. If you're planning on having a
distributed team, doing it early on is the best, and perhaps the only, time to
do it.

------
tptacek
The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on
Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it.

A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely
without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099
contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm.

Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a
middleman that serves no purpose whatsoever except to serve as a legal fig
leaf). 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee and (b) because
it's technically unlawful to classify full-time employees as contractors.

~~~
brogrammer90
Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?

~~~
evansolomon
Automattic "employees" outside of the US and Canada are contractors.

(I used to work at Automattic)

~~~
hew
This is no longer accurate. Some remain "contractors" still officially due to
regulatory issues, but we now have employees in multiple locations outside
North America. And that list of locations is growing.

(I work at Automattic)

~~~
evansolomon
Figured this was the case but assumed it didn't changed the gist of the answer
too much. tl;dr actually employing people in other countries is difficult

------
ownedthx
I have completely 180'ed on this topic. I used to think to be a successful
startup, you all had to be in the same room, ideally at a big huge desk etc.

After working at my current startup, I realize I was wrong. We are an entirely
remote operation, and have been since day 1. A few of us are in Austin, and
rarely meet for a face-to-face, but it's more of a 'oh yeah, you actually
exist' meeting rather than a hash-it-out sort of meeting.

I think the reason we have been successful is because being remote has forced
us to write things down, in our wiki (in the form of product specs) and in
JIRA (in the form of specific features and bug fixes). With just those two
forms of written communication, we've solved 95% of our communication needs.
We almost never skype or use video conferencing... it's just not needed.

The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done
startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is
enough, but does deserve more explanation. (unfortunately I can't muster the
amount of typing atm).

IN the end, we can focus on getting work done... without the distraction of
office chatter, commuting, long lunches.

~~~
mattm
> The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done
> startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this
> is enough

I've worked remotely for a few years now and think this is the key. I would
not advocate hiring junior developers remotely. There's too much risk in it. I
was once faced with the task of trying to mentor a junior dev remotely and it
just didn't work.

~~~
samastur
In general I would agree, but I think it also depends on junior developer in
question. Every now and then you meet someone whose overflowing intelligence,
talent and work ethic will make them an exceptional engineer, but are not
there yet. It would be a shame not to support that.

I recently mentored such person and she is already one of our most productive
developers.

------
kartikkumar
For argument's sake, if remote work isn't the solution, how about taking the
middle ground? I don't see a lot of companies setting up offices in other
parts of the world until much later on the growth curve. Is there a
fundamental reason for this? Is it simply cost? Seems to me that SV companies
can do great things by even opening up 2-3 person shops elsewhere in the
world. You then have the compromise situation of having a few people
collocated, which should cut down the need to continuous remote meetings, and
at the same time provide simultaneous access to new growth markets. In effect,
you have remote offices as opposed to remote employees, which seems like a
much more efficient organization of resources.

------
photomatt
If you do this right, there's no "remote", there's no "overseas", there's no
day-to-day distinction in how someone works between whether that person
happens to live in the country the company was founded or not.

------
jamiemchale
Isn't there a tremendous upside to being physically co-located? Even if the
teams are remote, are the founders not usually located in a 'tech hub' city
(SF, NY, etc.)?

Matt says to let people 'live someplace remarkable', but for most of the world
that want to work in technology SF _is_ someplace remarkable.

The benefits of using group collaboration tools are still available, but you
have other people working on overlapping problems on your doorstep, support
and service companies, and access to intelligent finance.

~~~
kenrikm
The Bay Area is pretty awesome however the housing prices are not, I would say
it's the single biggest issue here. I've been told my $2000/mo Rent for a
500Sqft 1Br Apartment in San Mateo is a "good deal".. to contrast that the
mortgage on my 2000Sqft house back in Miami (not far from the beach) is
$650/mo including Taxes and Insurance.

------
photomatt
It's worth repeating that I absolutely believe we should improve and
dramatically open up immigration in the US, and applaud PG's and other's work
there, but in the meantime you don't have to handicap your company because of
the current politics around this issue.

------
digitalwaveride
There are companies like teleport [http://teleport.org](http://teleport.org)
that try to visualise this potential with data.

Also recommend this YCombinator startup school talk by Balaji Srinivasan on
this topic: Silicon Valleys Ultimate Exit
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A)

------
StylusEater
Spot on! Seems the "shortage" isn't in labor but in deference to employees as
people. Wouldn't you want a horde of folks willing to work 80+ hours for
Ramen? </cynic>

------
fecak
It's interesting how many commenters read "remote" as "contract" or even
"overseas". There are lots of developers outside of SF, NYC, Chicago, etc.
that would relish the opportunity to still live their suburban/rural lifestyle
and avoid a lengthy commute.

One advantage for companies in big cities is they can usually hire these
remote employees at a discount. It can get a bit hairy when two remote
employees doing the same job are paid differently, but that is already the
case in many situations.

The other obvious advantage is that companies that hire remote employees have
an almost unlimited candidate pool. Even if a company chose to limit hires to
their own country, the only group they cannot hire would be candidates
unwilling to work remotely. Based on my discussions with thousands of
programmers over the years, I'd suspect this is a very small group.

------
intortus
This is where I think Paul Graham gets it wrong:

> Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming
> that is not merely the product of training.

This is the old "you're either an exceptional programmer or you're not" myth.
This is one reason why diversity in tech has regressed since the 80s.

I agree that geopolitical boundaries should matter less in the software
business. However, I strongly disagree that this is the solution to programmer
scarcity. Expanding your source of resumes to the entire world only delays the
inevitable. Why focus on removing the dependency on the passport variable,
when we still have such a strong dependency on gender and race?

------
abalone
I find this post and many remote-advocacy posts like it are overly optimistic
about the problem of timezone differences. A critical flaw is that most of the
"solutions" mentioned assume you're all working at the same time. (Skype, G+
Hangouts, chatrooms.) That may be ok for workers living in less expensive
parts of America or the western hemisphere, but that certainly doesn't hold
true for overseas workers, which is what Paul Graham is mostly talking about
with immigration.

An 8-12 hour timezone gap is not something easily bridged by chatrooms and
videoconferences. To even have a conversation with the remote worker/team, one
or both of you need to schedule time at very early or late hours and even then
you only get a little bit of overlap. For the most part you are left to
collaborate by email or blogs -- which is a _significantly_ degraded way of
collaborating, much moreso than just not being face-to-face. Without an easy
way to have a realtime conversation, closing the loop on an issue can take 24
hours.. or several _days_ if there is a lot of back and forth.

This style of working can be very difficult in a highly dynamic, less
structured, fast moving startup environment. It is not magically solved by
"modern communication tools" or high-latency asynchronous working styles. The
fundamental issue is.. daylight and human sleep schedules.

I wish all conversations about remote work would qualify which context they're
talking about -- near or far timezones -- instead of just lumping it all
together as "remote work from anywhere".

------
choppaface
I've worked both onsite and remote as a software dev / data engineer. I
started out onsite. There are major disadvantages to remote work:

* Amount you learn from the office community is orders of magnitude lower than onsite. If you're good at pushing yourself to learn new things, that can help, but your knowledge will almost certainly end up less diversified living remotely. You're just not exposed to the company's tech challenges as deeply, yet that's usually one of the main reasons for working at the company.

* You don't necessarily get top projects, but rather perhaps good projects that fit remote work. Taking a remote role almost certainly hurts your career if you want to compete with traditionally onsite roles.

* You likely don't get to participate in hiring or shaping the culture in a substantial way.

* You'll have a much harder time building the network needed to get access to key resources (e.g. data, people, etc).

* Your company better have a nice VPN or you're going to be doing a lot of systems-oriented stuff for yourself. It can be fun but can slow you down.

* You're probably more likely to be laid off.

The company I worked for started offering remote much more frequently due to
recruiting and retention problems. I don't think the net result had a very
positive impact on the Eng org. In particular, a lot of junior people were
allowed to go remote for retention reasons but they didn't end up doing much
in that role-- they would have been much better off just joining a different
company (either local to them or one with a much much stronger remote
culture).

Agree with the poster that PG's essay has some holes; seems orders of
magnitude less polished than his older essays.

~~~
choppaface
Downvotes because I insulted pg or because I argued remote was bad??

------
barce
This is a great how to article on remote management. The tools he lists are
all there. The author mentions Skype, Slack, G+ Hangouts, and then
surprisingly WordPress. Would the author care to discuss how _he_ specifically
has used WordPress to remote manage a team? I think the issue is that most
managers don't want to remote manage which makes me wonder, "Why?"

~~~
sberkun10
I worked for Mullenweg for a year at WordPress.com to write a book about all
of these questions. It documents all the tools I used and what life was like
as a remote manager of a development team.

[http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-
Futur...](http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Future-
ebook/dp/B00DVJXI4M)

You can read a free chapter about culture from the book here:

[http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-
excer...](http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excerpt-from-
the-year-without-pants/)

~~~
massimosgrelli
Do you recommend this book to understand remote working dynamics at Wordpress
? Learning from companies that succeeded in setting up the remote working
practice is definitely the best way to understand if you can put the process
in a bottle. Anyway thanks for sharing this title.

------
guelo
It's all been tried and people know the tradeoffs, and there are tradeoffs no
matter what you might think. The drive and culture that can develop when a
small focused team spends every waking hour together can become almost cult-
like. This culture is what VCs want to foment. It's also why they like hiring
22 year olds that can be more impressionable.

------
geetarista
Under jasode's thread, you can see that people are missing Paul's point. He's
not saying that working with close proximity is the "best" way of working. Yet
most people here are debating which type of work is. Each company, market,
vertical, team, etc. will vary in manifold ways.

What I believe Paul is asking for is that companies have the option to choose.
Right now the option is available to anyone to hire remotely in one way or
another. This is not the case with physically hiring into the country. Almost
every startup I've worked at has had issues trying to hire exceptional people
from another country. In almost every case, we lost those hires to the system
and were forced to start the search again.

If a small, remote, international startup grows fast enough and they decide
that working together under one roof in the U.S. fits their new needs, they
should have the freedom and choice to do so.

------
snowwrestler
The topics of remote work and of immigration reform seem unrelated to me.

A better immigration system would be better for the U.S., in that it would
allow the best programmers to come here if they want to. That is clearly
better for the U.S. as a whole, since it would make it easier to raise the
national technical talent level relative to other nations. These new Americans
would hopefully become citizens, raise families, vote, sit on school boards,
run for elected office, start companies, etc.--improving the nation from
within over time with their perspectives, talents, desires, and hard work (as
past generations of immigrants have).

Contracting with foreign workers through the Internet does not achieve any of
those long-term national goals.

Once new workers are legally within the U.S., I agree that they should have
the freedom to choose remote work if they want to, or colocating work if they
want to.

------
acgourley
Paul Graham is deferring to his portfolio founders' words and actions. Does
author believe all these smart and highly incentivized founders are wrong,
too? I hope he realizes how strong that claim is and that by doing so he
should accept the burden of proof.

------
rev_bird
I would _love_ to have remote work, but I am honestly unsure about whether I'm
good enough at my job to enjoy it. My concern isn't with performing my current
job, but every promotion/job change I've had has been because of the things I
learned in some free time from somebody sitting next to me. It's so nice to be
able to wander over to a smart person and ask about some random problem I've
been having in an area in which they're an expert. I have no doubt I learn
more in an office than I would in my living room.

...then again, that's probably why remote workers say they're more productive.

------
overgard
The problem with this argument is that it lumps all versions of "Remote"
together, but that's not really true. There's a huge difference between the
guy who is remote because he has a long commute, vs the guy who is remote
because he lives on the east coast, vs the guy who is remote because he's in
china or london.

The common theme of all that is: timezones matter a lot. It's hard to
collaborate with someone really far away because they'll tend to be asleep
when you're awake. Programmers like async communication for a lot of reasons,
but real-time is important too.

------
Tycho
I would be interested in reading a PG essay responding to this very point.

------
unclebucknasty
Meh. Keep the barriers high and the labor market tight for as long as
possible. Let companies compete for workers like the good ol' days. Let
startups use more of that VC cash on its workers and also help keep rates up
for IT workers across the country.

I know we Yanks get no sympathy from the rest of the world, but labor here has
taken a beaten long enough.

And, I say this as a dev-turned-founder who would presumably now want to see
low rates and a bigger pool. I guess I just appreciate more a little "economic
justice" from time-to-time!

------
gaius
Let us assume a company where everyone works from home and meetings are held
in Starbucks or airport lounges. Such a company would save many thousands of
dollars per employee per year, maybe tens of thousands. No real estate, no
receptionist, no cleaners, no equipment to buy or IT dept to support it...

Such a company would probably pay less than market rates, due to the "perk" of
allowing remote work? But where's that money going? If you are an engineer
considering remote working, make sure YOU get a slice of the pie.

------
modzilla
It is clear various tools can be effective or ineffective for companies and
individuals – this is a __very __subjective topic. However, since many tech
companies, who have subjectively decided they want to have all of their
employees in the same physical location, have a talent shortage problem, it
would seem only beneficial to modify our immigration policy to allow more of
these highly skilled individuals to work in the US. There outcomes of making
such changes are almost exclusively positive.

------
Mz
I was part of a virtual team many years ago, before all these tools existed. I
was the only one on the West Coast, not in a position to meet others face to
face -- at least not more than once, for a conference I attended -- and was
the newest to the group, younger than most of the others, etc. There were
several dimensions in which I was an outlier for the group. Ultimately, it
ended on something of a sour note. I was basically accused of being a
"traitor" for doing my actual job. I and the person at the top had very
different ideas about how things should be handled and my domain expertise was
not really respected. (After my departure, the project that had benefited the
most from my input kind of died back down again.)

I spend a lot of my time online and I have taken a lot of online college
classes. When I had a job at BigCo, I got in the habit of emailing my
questions to my immediate boss, whose role included answering technical
questions. For various reasons, I was unable to master the art of catching her
at her desk or whatever. Emailing worked better for me.

I and some of my teammates got transferred to a new team that initially did
not have someone in the technical role she filled. Until the new team got
their own technical lead, we were all still assigned to our old lead. Other
teammates of mine who were used to having face-time with our lead were
incredibly frustrated. My transition was quite smooth. I rarely needed face-
time with her to get good results. I just continued emailing my questions as
usual. I also was not particularly "likable." I was quite ill at the time and
not at my smoothest socially. I also just come from a more formal cultural
background than the people I was surrounded by. I was not interested in being
too schmoozy. In the short run, this seemed to hurt me a bit. But once I got
transferred to a new team, it was to my benefit: Getting my questions answered
had been a purely professional function, not something rooted in being
friendly or whatever.

So I think there are good points on both sides of this argument. I see several
really good comments here falling on either side. And I think the disconnect
probably has to do with some social thing that can be fostered remotely but
many people aren't good at it. As we develop more online/virtual/long distance
cultural practices, I think this will become less of a divide for some people.

------
ryanSrich
Great points. I'm actually working on a longer piece with actual numbers as a
follow up to remote working as a solution to the talent "shortage".

------
mikeleeorg
Just to jump on the point of being physically co-located: I've done both.
There are pros and cons to each. What I've found is: it all depends on the
people in the company. Some work best when they're right next to you, able to
share a drink after work to decompress. Others want to run to the beach to go
surfing right after a meeting. Both can be equally talented, but vary
significantly in their modus operandi.

------
meritt
For entry-level people, I've really found an office helps with mentoring and
culture assimilation in a way that fully-remote cannot even remotely reach.

I still don't feel there's any reason you need to physically exist in the Bay
area though. Open an office somewhere that's both attractive and affordable
for people to live and you enable the best of both worlds.

------
welshguy
If my business pays for a great programmer, I want that programmer's
knowledge, experience and attitude to diffuse to the rest of my team (... not
that I have a business, just sayin' :-). Much harder to do this if that great
programmer isn't in the office.

~~~
cgh
In my eight years' remote working experience, your statement is false.

~~~
dannyr
What he is saying is that it is harder, not impossible.

Are you saying that remote work is as good if not better than being
physically-located?

~~~
cgh
I'm saying that's it's not harder. Thus his statement is false.

------
sarperdag
I’ve written an article on this issue recently as well.

[https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-
tal...](https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-talent-
wherever-in-the-world-you-are-6b558ddef519)

------
stevesi
My $0.02 all here [http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-
eng...](http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-engineering-
is-so-difficult/)

------
malisper
The next question is what happens to people who want to work _in_ the US?

------
lukasm
This is my inspiration to create [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-
remote-job/](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/)

------
dvo19
As I work remotely, it is the best. I think it is up to the individual. If the
individual does not want to work, he or she does not want to work regardless
at home or at the work place.

------
jfaucett
The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers.
Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and
retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor.

EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from
other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the
U.S. wouldn't make you a contractor. But how would this work for non us-
citizens?

~~~
Vekz
The article didn't say anything explicitly about remote contractors. The two
companies it did reference Automattic and Github have remote full time
employees.

~~~
kylec
Another commenter in this thread said that Automattic workers outside the US
and Canada are contractors:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183)

------
jweir
Remote workers present challenges.

Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea
contractors?

Managing developers across time zones can be a big problem. If the developer
in the Ukraine has a question for a manger asleep in California, he has to
wait.

There is no casual connection between people - no going to a bar to talk
things over, no stepping away from the computer to talk. All communication is
filtered down through the pipes.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
The larger point of this discussion is that mass immigration presents other
challenges, some much harder to overcome. For example, the nightmare that is
the political discussion of immigration in the USA, and for another example,
the skyrocketing living costs in US cities that are tech hubs.

Trying to solve the problems you outline seem to be technical, which are
easier than the fundamental problems of politics or economics.

------
datashovel
I read the PG article as a "grass is always greener" argument.

~~~
datashovel
I just read the footnote:

[1] How much better is a great programmer than an ordinary one? So much better
that you can't even measure the difference directly....

You do not get to hire those people. And if you do it's on their terms.
Perhaps you get to invest in their ideas if you're lucky.

------
muhannad0147
Muhannad0147@hotmail.com

------
trustfundbaby
> In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first
> principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look
> at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to
> set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated
> environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes

This is the best rebuttal to the more-immigration-so-we-can-haz-programmers
I've read in a long time. And its so true. The way the current work visa
(h1-b) is setup makes it far more likely that good programmers get tied to
stodgy plodding firms and not smaller innovative ones that tech needs them to
work for. Remote work and rewriting the current h1-b laws to make it so that
h1-bs can more easily transfer their work permits and work for whoever they
like, whenever they like ... remotely as well ... just like their American
contemporaries would open up lots of supply.

but what the big firms really want is more pliant programmers who will work
within the rigid confines they set up. Thats why we're not talking more about
the mechanics of the work visa and the green card process which is currently
set up pretty restrictively.

------
walshemj
Oh dear sorry to rain on your parade experience shows that the way to get the
best performance is collocated teams of developers ideally coloacted with the
end customer.

I know this isn't what a lot of HN readers want to hear but I bet Paul and
many other VC's would bear me out.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Do you actually have data on this, or is this completely anecdotal?

~~~
walshemj
30+ years of experience also read steve McConnell.

------
na85
Hey Matt, I'm so glad you felt it necessary to include that DHTML snowstorm.
My laptop fan really needed the exercise and I have your ~500-line JavaScript
workout to thank for it!

Of course, I closed the tab pretty much immediately after noticing it so I
didn't read the article. Can't wait for unnecessary js to go out of style.

~~~
brandon272
As soon as I saw the snowflakes falling, I thought, "Oh jeez, someone on HN is
going to be having a meltdown over this!"

Sure enough.

