IMHO the real issue isn't that they many companies can't find great programmers, its that they only want great programmers who live in their locality.
For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested.
They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies). Importing people from overseas to the bay area is actually the hard way of solving the problem.
From first hand XP, I can tell you going distributed has made hiring top notch talent 10x easier. And if I hire someone overseas, they don't have to move...
Again, IMHO all the excuses like "culture" are bullshit, if your culture depends on holding hands as a group every day, your company culture is already fatally weak.
Warning, anecdotal data ahead: I would not want to work under remote conditions again. In my career I have worked mainly under "startup conditions". At Apple on iPhone, everyone lived in the same place and worked non stop on the product, same as when I left to start a company. On my second company, I had many remote workers. The reality I experienced is that there was at least a 2-3x slowdown. When people are on different time zones, what used to take 5 minutes can become a 1 day turnaround through email and waiting for the other person to be up. Perhaps it works under certain scales, but when you're trying to be nimble it's just one more needlessly complex factor. What ended up happening is everyone got on a in between sleep schedule which was pretty bad for everyone's outside of work life.
Both working in and managing distributed teams is a skill that needs to be learned and homed. In comparison to my experiences, it seems like the distributed team you worked on was highly dysfunctional. I think I distributed startup spanning more the a handful of adjacent timezones is probably a mistake. Task assignment need to be done in a way that is cognizant of the people/timezone interdependencies. Even a non-startup might find it useful to break the various teams up by clusters of close timezones so that the regular work-flows don't experience this kind of lag.
What frustrates me about remote workers is they cluster around eastern europe or india/china with main offices in the USA. They're all hugely different time zones.
I think remote workers who are in the same time zone area as the main office, say north or south america, might work better. But I don't know because I haven't had a chance to work on that kind of team.
I'm not sure when you worked remotely but I can tell you remote work in 2014 is much much different. First off, using email internally for communication makes no sense. If you're a truly distributed team[1] you use teamspeak, or hangouts, or slack, or IRC, or anything other than email.
Second there are no radically different timezones within the US. If you're on the east coast you work most days from 10 - 6, if you're on the west coast you work most days from 7 - 3.
Third if you're working on something pressing with your distributed team you schedule some time together to work later. If you're on the east coast you may have some nights during a sprint where you're wrapping up at 9pm or 10pm.
Fourth no matter where your team is located if you have members in different US (or even international) timezones you want at least 4 hours during the day spent together (employees are really only performing at the top of their game for a fraction of the day anyway [2]).
[1] A truly distributed team is one that supports remote workers via communication and culture as much as they do their local employees.
I'm currently working at a place that produces 30,000 euro machines. It's pretty handy to be in the same place as the other developers, so they don't have to ship everyone their own 30,000 euro machine to work with. And that's just the developers; if there's a problem with the motors or other bits and pieces, that's another department that needs to be called in to have a look. Not very convenient if everyone lives in different places.
I've always said that my lack of desire to play ping pong or sit in the office beanbag chair has no relevance to my ability to deliver value. "Culture" isn't ping pong and a beer fridge; unfortunately many companies in the startup world think that it is.
How is it that every time someone makes this argument, they do it in such a superficial, arrogant and ignorant way that makes me not want to work with them, remotely or otherwise?
The bandwidth of personal IRL interaction adds enormous value. Yes, in many scenario's that value is not strictly necessary, or can be compensated.
But if you think it's bullshit, or something for "dinosaurs", you have a serious problem. Not just as a programmer, but as a human being.
>The bandwidth of personal IRL interaction adds enormous value.... But if you think it's bullshit, or something for "dinosaurs", you have a serious problem. Not just as a programmer, but as a human being.
To be fair I never said real-life face time lacked value. I think periodic group meet-ups are helpful and need to happen. I think you were reading words I never wrote. I think ideally a distributed teams do need to have retreats together. (This is a "like milkshakes, but do I need one everyday for lunch" kind of thing IMHO)
>How is it that every time someone makes this argument, they do it in such a superficial, arrogant and ignorant way
I was addressing the authors point that: the way to to address this "scarcity" is by importing people from over seas into a few major metro areas. My point is if there are many domestic (or foreign) resources outside of said metro areas there isn't really more then a self-imposed scarcity.
>you have a serious problem. Not just as a programmer, but as a human being.
I was sharing an opinion-- I am totally OK with you disagreeing with it, that is fine, but that above response was beyond rude, it was personal and cruel.
For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested.
They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies). Importing people from overseas to the bay area is actually the hard way of solving the problem.
From first hand XP, I can tell you going distributed has made hiring top notch talent 10x easier. And if I hire someone overseas, they don't have to move...
Again, IMHO all the excuses like "culture" are bullshit, if your culture depends on holding hands as a group every day, your company culture is already fatally weak.