I work at an organization with four geographic locations that also allows for 'telework' a certain number of days a week. It moved to this model a couple of years ago.

Even if you come to the office, your team may be on the other side of the country. The roles range from sysad to developer to research.

What I've noticed is that people figure it out. They create ways to communicate efficiently, they find the right tools to solve their workflow issues, and they ultimately are as productive as they'd be in the office cube farm together. Sometimes more so, since working at home gives you the ability to focus more in addition to the creature comforts that make your quality of work life that much better.

Anecdotal, perhaps, but relevant to the conversation.

Probably an unpopular opinion but as someone working in a creative side of a tech company, my interactions with remote workers are tedious at best.

Discussions that would be counted in seconds sitting side by side turn into 10-20 minute long video awkward skype calls.

There is so much anecdotal evidence in blog posts about how great remote is for your devs because "an interruption costs 15 minutes of concentration" yet very little about the reality of other people in the organisation having to work with these privileged employees.

"having to work with these privileged employees"

That is a big problem with remote work--that it is viewed as being a privileged employee. If companies have remote workers, they should allow anyone to work remotely and design interactions around remote work. Otherwise, you end up with resentment and poor communication. By design interactions I mean figuring out a method/system of communication that works just as well as in the office. Some companies do this with video boards/google hangouts.

> However, how do you deliver more value than someone from a developing country if your pipes are so narrow?

I have moved to a developing country, and now I work from here.

Below the line, there are many candidates to one job. Above the line, there are many jobs to one candidate. Above the line, you can work from where you like. Below the line, you are lucky to have a job at all. They can even tell you to dress like a clown for work, if that is their fancy, and what can you do about it? Nothing.

> I think there's still a lot of room for the value provided by teams working closely together.

Not really. Anybody with talents above the line, will not join such team. So, you will be surrounded by people with talent that is too limited to get what they want. You will most likely not learn anything useful either. What you describe is the prototypical dead-end job.

Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.

This is nonsense. Body language, tone, empathy: all are crucial to successful communication between people, even engineers, even technical communications, believe it or not.

Completely agree. Often times the emotion is even worse over email or IM - I've seen people (engineers) be a lot harsher and a lot less receptive to alternative ideas over a text medium than they ever would face-to-face.

If true, this is fine, as long as you are an engineer and talk only to other engineers. People from different backgrounds don't use email this way, though.

Text is the least efficient of all forms of commutations.

How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?

> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?

A better question is how long to say something that is well thought out and matters vs. how long to write something that is well thought out and matters. I have found that talking leads to lots of talking with little real substance unless it is meant to be a brainstorm session. And even then, writing ideas down before hand help to quickly get to the sticking points rather than bike shedding over something trivial and wasting everyones time.

Writing out a page long email forces the writer to think through and address their idea more seriously up front. This is why Bezos famously requires a written memo for a new idea before the meeting [0].

[0] http://blog.idonethis.com/jeff-bezos-self-discipline-writing...

> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?

How long to deliver a speech. How long to send a one-sentence IM?

> Text is the least efficient of all forms of commutations.

Less efficient than semaphore or smoke signals?

In reality, text is very efficient form of communication, and it has the benefit of being asynchronous.

How long do the sound waves from speech persist in a gaseous medium, or the often equally gaseous white matter between your ears? How long does an email, backed up and archived by sender, recipient, archiving software, compliance department, etc, etc persist.

People tend to actually think before they write something down that will last forever. Much less so when they're flapping their gums in real-time. High quality, premeditated communication trumps low-quality, off-the-cuff communication, for me, anyway.

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