I've both hired and advised people hiring.

This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant.

The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You know, if we just had 1) better managers, 2) better specs, 3) better tools"

We have been trying all of this for 30 years or so. At some point a reasonable person would look around and see that most all startups are colocated, physically in the same room having to deal with each other all day long.

There are plenty of theories as to why this is true. Another observation: people not in the office do best at rote work: fix the bugs, align the images on the website, and so on.

If your job could be done by robots -- if it required minimal interaction over electronic tools to get specs and deliver on them in an over-the-wall manner -- it will be done by robots. Creating technology is about people, not technology. You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving.

Best-case scenario: you work on a tightly-knit team for a few weeks/months on a fixed-length job. Everybody gets into sync on the customer, specs, terminology, and solution. The customer's problem is not changing that much. You deliver some stuff as a team that people like. At that point, and not before, who cares where people are? Just get the work done.

You can scale that out to working in BigCorp on a fixed domain, but only so much. And the scary thing is that there are no alarms that go off if you're doing it wrong.

It's not impossible, or bad. But it works under very limited conditions. Understanding that is critical. I know there are a ton of folks who want to work remotely. I am one of them. But wanting something and looking realistically at what works or not are two different things.

> You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving.

Are you implying that "interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans" requires physical presence?

It doesn't require it, but in my experience is vastly more effective; teleconferencing (even with all the wiz-bang tech aids available) is vastly lower bandwidth and reduced options for interaction, and a lot more opportunity for distraction/interruption, either physically at any of the involved locations or because of tech failures.

Two excellent sources are Moral Mazes [0] and Peopleware [1]. Moral Mazes is a principled and academic study of how managers believe ethics and morality work within systems of bureaucracy, and how this differs from the ethical expectations of subordinates and citizens who then have to develop their own rationalizations for how to fit into bureaucratic apparatuses, which they depend on for their livelihood, while compromising away what they believe to be basic and unalienable humanity-affirming principles in order to conform to business expectations. It uses qualitative data from a longitudinal survey in which the author gathered interviews from employees at all levels of corporate hierarchy over a period of years from several different (anonymized) companies in the 80s.

I really wish Moral Mazes was required reading in college. It would have helped me prepare for the shocking business world dysfunction that awaits virtually every employee, in every field, after graduation.

Peopleware is a classic within specifically software management, and deals with many of the same human-affirming principles that you see in Moral Mazes, but deals with them in formats that are specific to software. There are a lot of connections between the two books, but the connections haven't been well formalized as far as I know.

I love these two books because as you read them the slow feeling of horror comes over you as you see the true diff between how companies operate and how a company should operate if it is to maintain even the tiniest degree of humanity-affirming ethical commitment or even the tiniest degree of genuine concerns for (even from a market competition point of view) how productivity should be marshaled for general human progress.

I find there are more or less two types of reactions. Some people read them and go, "Yep. I've seen all that. No surprises here. Oh well, back to work." and just don't care because they just want to focus on local instrumentally rational actions even if it means participating in what is making the entire concept of employment so shitty. Some other people read them and find that it makes their soul glow again a little and they have a hard time ever fitting back into a company now that they have some formalized tools for recognizing how shittily they are being treated at all times.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

Also a good popular article drawing on Moral Mazes: < http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... >.

I read _Peopleware_ when it first came out, and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. I've actually bought it three times, because I "loaned" it to someone and never got the book back.

I haven't encountered _Moral Mazes_ before; I'm going to look for it now!