Re:90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housin...
by GFischer on Friday April 27, 2018 @08:27AM
(#16940261)
You're mixing up two claims, I mostly agree with one and strongly disagree with the other.
Claim I agree is there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.
Which is very different from the claim I strongly disagree with which is: only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
I DO agree that there's an advantage to on-site work.
Individual anecdotes that support one case or another are easy to dig up, but you would be hard-pressed to find large pieces of really innovative software products developed without people in close proximity (you could claim that the Linux Kernel is a big project but that's an open source software that is not really a commercial product).
Everybody can not move to the Bay Area, and good developers do not become bad by moving away or not being there, but the simple fact remains: there are no (financially) large and successful software companies have been fully distributed from the ground up.