Re:A Short Rant About Working Remotely
by el_cuadrado on Thursday January 31, 2013 @01:03PM
(#5146278)
2006 happened 7 years ago. Time flies.
Software changes in 7 years - people don't. [I mean the average person; individuals age and get more experienced, but new ones come in.]
Today's homo sapiens brains function the same way as in 2006. Productivity of mental workers responds to disruptions in the same way as in 2006. A large majority of programmers and other people working now in IT are the very same people that were analyzed in 2006.
Brain function is not the only variable at play here. Software and culture change constantly.
Yes, but haven't the tools for working remotely improved a lot since 2006?
Re:A Short Rant About Working Remotely
by adrianhoward on Friday February 01, 2013 @04:19AM
(#5149945)
Not really - no. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I couldn't do six years ago.
There are a few more options maybe - but nothing fundamentally different.
They have, but if you look at it in terms of fundamental change, then of course not.
For example, a cell phone from today isn't fundamentally different than a cell phone from a decade ago. They're both computers and can be used to make phone calls. But with the cellphone of today, I can have a virtual meeting with anyone from anywhere, face-to-face. That alone is a huge improvement for distributed teams.
Actually - several of them are. For example:
"Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006)"
This is one of the things I find fascinating. You see the same kind of thing over thirty years as technology changes radically. This makes me think that there's something quite interesting happening in meat-space.
Startup environments are not average, and this must be why companies like Github and 37signals can be successful while having remote workers.
Just to repeat. I am not saying that you cannot be successful being distributed. There are lots of good and sane reasons to be distributed.
I'm saying that there is a bunch of evidence that being co-located is more effective.