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Re:San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents by bunderbunder on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @07:33PM (#11435436)
I hope that by "mobile-connected smart whiteboard for every team member" you mean "laptop or tablet with touchscreen, and a stylus".

You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.

Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.

This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.

Re:San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents by ebiester on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @10:30AM (#11438969)
By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team.

Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.

But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.

Re:San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents by bunderbunder on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @01:06PM (#11440077)
Yea, with partial co-location you need to budget at least 25% of your person-hours to hostage negotiations and koombeya meetings about people's hurt feelings.

0/10, would not try again.