

Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder - milesf
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3330-better-remote-collaboration-will-make-protectionism-harder

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taude
Hmmm...Not sure I agree with this, because I don't think it scales. Look at
all the off-shore investment that corporations have investing in cheaper IT
markets. Eventually those markets get more expensive. And then there's the
quality debate for anything that requires multiple resources.

Also, theres a huge cost in time and risk in finding these remote resources,
at least more so than Local.

But for finding a few golden-people for your small company, sure, that works.

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LaGrange
You know, no matter how much disposable income I get in Warsaw, Poland, I
can't make it suddenly sprout Dutch or Swiss quality of public transportation,
health care, food and entertainment. And commuting (by public transport)
encourages cohesion within cities as well. So yeah, sorry, but I'd rather have
the 120, lower disposable, and live in a nicer place. I also remember climate
in SF was pretty nice.

Not that remoting is evil or anything, but if it became a monoculture just
like working from office was just a few years ago, the side effects can be
devastating to some finer points of life. Too many great food places live off
office workers eating lunch in them, and if a regular 15-minute rhythm train
service between nearby cities stops making sense for commuters, my ability to
visit a friend in there on a whim disappears as well.

~~~
marknutter
There are plenty of cities in the world that have a cost of living that's a
fraction of the cost of living in San Francisco but have just as impressive
infrastructure and weather.

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milesf
Dang, I wish I had the results, but a friend of mine wrote some code to pull
in data from several different sources on all of the cities in the world. He's
a remote worker, single, and can live anywhere in the world. He compared all
kinds of things including cost of living, weather, crime rate, internet speed,
and a bunch of other variables.

He moved to Panama City, Panama.

~~~
pretoriusB
So he had no attachment to any lover, friend, family, city or even country.
Could be also described like hell on earth for some of us...

~~~
jtheory
Sometimes your family & friends are already spread all over the globe, and you
can't live near more than one or two of them at best.

Sometimes the city you're living in is a haunted place for you already --
after a severe personal loss, attack, stalker, etc..

Sometimes you suddenly find yourself with few close connections where you
currently live (prime example: finishing grad school), and you have the
opportunity to stretch your boundaries by _not_ simply moving back to your
hometown (or even home country).

Or you may just have "itchy feet" syndrome, and you start getting pretty
unpleasant to be around if you're stuck in one town for more than a few years,
seeing the same people around.

I'm married and we have two kids; each of us was born in a different country.
I didn't leave the US initially for lack of people who liked my wife & I; to
the contrary, the support of our friends was quite necessary because it was
not always easy, initially. But it gets easier; and making human connections
in a few disparate environments is enlightening, to say the least.

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tomjen3
That is step one.

Step two is that the best workers move out to cheaper locations -- after all
why not command mostly the same salary from some tropical location? Look at
how the people who take outsourced work in India live and compare it to your
standard of living. Do you have a driver? Chef?

Anyway this is basically rehearsing the decades old arguments about
outsourcing -- which didn't exactly kill software development in expensive
countries.

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sxp
One really annoying factor about collaboration across timezones is trying to
get schedules to sync up. Especially if there is an 8+ hour difference. Back
and forth communication ends up taking much longer and can significantly slow
down the project. One interesting solution was examined in Cory Doctorow's
Eastern Standard Tribe [1] where online communities form based on the sleep
cycles of people rather than their location.

It would be possible for remote workers to use melatonin supplements and light
therapy to intentionally manipulate their sleep schedules to sync up with
their HQ if they are willing to tolerate the offset from the local schedule.
Even more interesting would be if everyone switches to something like Uberman
[2] so that working at various timezones becomes feasible.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Standard_Tribe> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep>

~~~
CodeCube
Yes, sometimes the timezone difference can be difficult if the two parties are
not equally as empowered (or even as good). But I'll give you an example. A
guy I was working with decided to transfer to my company's singapore office
(12h difference). Working with him was _awesome_! I could be working on
something all day, then write him an email on where things where at EOD, along
with things I wanted him to take care of. When my morning rolled around again,
everything was done, and I had an email from him sitting in my inbox of stuff
I needed to look at. Our work was getting done literally 24 hours a day :P

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altcognito
Small colocated groups invested in the future of the company are always going
to outproduce (comparing hours to hours) disparate resources pulled together
on the fly.

The best exception to the colocation rule is the open source model, but OS can
"get away with it" because the contributers are very, very invested in the
outcome.

~~~
graeme
This is a straw man. Why would you compare one team invested in a company, to
another, remote team 'pulled together on the fly'

I say this as part of a three man team, all remote from each other, and all
invested in the company.

~~~
altcognito
Because I've worked at no less than three companies that have done exactly
that, and the entire basis of the article talks about the monetary value of
how you can move hours around, completely eliminating the human nature of work
and craftsmanship. People who work on projects that they aren't going to be
associated with in the future usually care less about quality.

Working colocated is only one facet of the equation. I would think ownership
is a well understood concept in the startup industry. Being invested means
more than being colocated or even having a financial stake. (open source
development -- again, some small number of passionate developers generally in
it for the long haul)

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mgl
This is exactly why we started Codedose[1] as a bunch of Java developers with
origins in the banking/consulting industry: to stay with our families and
friends in the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland, and keep our margin on the
attractive level working remotely with UK companies. Getting on a plane to
London is actually faster and more convenient than travelling to Warsaw by
train.

[1] <http://www.codedose.com>

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DanielBMarkham
Another way of saying this is that "Things change. They change in all
fields.In technology they change faster than most anywhere else."

I'm not sold on split teams, but I am sold on finding the right people no
matter where they are. Another strategy that works is using remote workers as
leverage. Lots of neat things happening here.

I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more jobs
from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about. We should
make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to buy them? We
should make all of our workers noncompetitive? We should make the world
economy conform to our ideas about how things work instead of how they
actually work? None of that makes any sense to me, so I'm at a loss at what an
intelligent person would be doing telling me these things.

As economies continue to get more virtual, we in technology will see how the
flat world plays out ahead of folks like doctors and realtors. Interesting
times ahead.

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koide
I like his vision. I hope it does come true.

To get there we need better collaboration tools. Although you can make it work
with IM/email/VoIP, it's still kind of clumsy.

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koops
This argument will carry a lot more weight when there is a successful company
(say, Instagram-successful) build and run by remote collaboration.

~~~
manuelflara
37signals doesn't count as a successful company?

~~~
koops
Sure, but they are still essentially a Chicago company.
<http://37signals.com/svn/writers/>

How about a company with principals/co-founders in different regions?

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dhh
We built Basecamp while I was working from Copenhagen, Denmark. I currently
live and work and wrote that piece from Spain. Out of some 35 people, only
about a third has base in Chicago. Out of that third, maybe half of them go to
the office every day.

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pretoriusB
> _I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more
> jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about._

They're talking about not playing in a race-to-the-bottom for global wages,
and using an internal market to the benefit of the majority of the people
(instead of businesses), which might not like having to pay more for a device
produce domestically, but they certainly like having a job economy and being
able to afford housing and bread on their table.

> _We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to
> buy them?_

The guy without a job because his went to a least expensive overseas facility
cannot afford many things in the first place, if anything. Getting things in a
"more expensive fashion" would be great for him. And he's like the majority.

