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Re:IBM says remote working is great after forcing employees ... by ghaff on Monday May 08, 2017 @01:05PM (#14293463)
I don't disagree that co-located teams can be very effective and, for some things, may be the only effective approach. However...

>They are the best and only method I know about to have groups of people solve complex problems creatively

A vast number of open source projects, including Linux, are created by very distributed groups of people. I would find it hard to argue that none of those projects involve solving complex problems creatively.

Re:IBM says remote working is great after forcing employees ... by DanielBMarkham on Monday May 08, 2017 @01:08PM (#14293496)
I would. Because at the end of the day, all of these projects have one or two creative elements with the rest of it being just grunt programming.

Note that by solving complex problems creatively, I mean business problems. Not technology. We don't need a co-located team to figure out that a bubble sort is the wrong tool for this job. We need a co-located team to figure out that we're headed down the wrong road and that 3 months of coding might be replaced with two system calls. That kind of conversation can be extremely uncomfortable or impossible to make happen with ten folks meeting over a IM link twice a day.