If something like this seems obvious to you, and obviously a lot of smart people are acting in the opposite way, maybe you should re-consider your assumptions.
In reality, online communication tools currently are a poor proxy for in-person communication in many situations. Online tools do not pick up the array of non-verbal cues humans make when talking to one another, are not stereoscopic, do not allow freedom of motion, do not permit the collaborative use of 3d space, etc. They are a piss poor real time communication medium compared to an in-person conversation in a room with whiteboards. If you can never actually have a face to face conversation with someone on your team, there's an entire dimension to communication you are completely prevented from ever experiencing with that person.
However I find that the amount of "heads down" work I get done is greatly diminished when I'm in an office. And, much worse, there's a lot of noise in that added communication of being in the office. Remote teams, in my experience, have dramatically less "office politics".
Office space is great for communicating "big ideas" but these aren't anywhere near the bulk of communications being had. For most of the communications needs of software remote works fine (in my experience better).
I work on a quite a few "big idea" projects and I've found the best solution is to visit the office quarterly, get all the big idea brainstorming done, then scurry off to my remote office where I'm not distracted by office politics and can just get things done. A little face time goes a long way, and annual, or semi-annual all hands meetups can do wonders at filling in the gaps created on remote teams.
In particular, I think distributed teams work best when a) people already have strong relationships built via plenty of in-person interaction, b) they meet regularly in person, and c) the nature of the work is relatively predictable.
There's definitely some work like that, but early-stage startups benefit a great deal from in person communication, which is high bandwidth, low latency, and very high quality.
I'd prefer private offices to remote distributed work. But I find it's actually easier to find remote jobs than software companies that make an effort to provide private offices.
I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
We do, sometimes hear from them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134592
I currently work at bootstrapped, distributed and profitable startup.
This year we did appx $15mm in rev.
http://www.inc.com/profile/buysellads (member of the Inc. 500)
Maybe it's the term I'm looking, but look through this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=distributed%20bootstrapped&sor...
As you scroll down try to piece together the story you're seeing. Click through to the companies. As I read it, hiring seems to be one of their biggest challenges. They're just not growing as much as they would like.
18 people in an office can build a $1 billion company with 10 million+ users in 18 months. (instagram.)
What's the closest a distributed team has come to that?
Tough comparison since so few companies embrace remote work, but see Automattic.
> does it work for succeeding really big
For really big companies there's always only so many people in any given city that you can hire. What's interesting is that most office based teams are effectively distributed in the collaborative work that they do with offices in other cities, yet they don't embrace individual distributed workers.
It doesn't seem to scale that well. (As in, they try but fail to scale it.) This is just my experience or impression.
Stack Exchange.
IME, not everyone has equal experience using those tools. It's WAY easier to do a cubicle fly-by than to train your non-technical workforce how Skype works (if that sounds crazy, trust me - it's not).
I work mostly remotely, but I care deeply about communication. I've invested in a great headset so calls aren't plagued by WFH artifacts. I have a cough button. I have a dedicated office in my house. I get up, showered, and dressed every day so I'm online and ready for an ad-hoc video call at all business hours. My internet is fast and stable, and I have two backups in the very rare case it goes down (iPhone tether, Verizon hotspot).
In sum, I don't want my convenience (wfh) to inconvenience anyone else, so I do everything I can to make that the case. It's worked out really well so far. But I can tell you, most developers don't go through the hassle.
The irony about tech being so adverse to remote work is pretty thick, at least that's what my friends in other sectors who work remote with no problem tell me. Even companies who build tools to enable remote work often don't embrace it themselves.
I would say I'm pretty against distributed teams at the moment. Would you mind elaborating on the value of them?
Or to put it another way, almost every recruiter e-mail I respond to states that I am not interested in relocating (usually to the bay area). Requiring all of your employees to sit in the same building is not just old fashioned, it misses out on talent that chooses to live elsewhere.
You're never going to have to worry about whether you need an open floorplan or not, because by default everybody gets a custom-designed private office.
Until that awesome employer has layoffs and your options get really limited out in Nowhere, UT.
Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe you even want that $600k suburban McMansion to raise your family in. That's not a problem either.
Most readers are probably going to prefer urban environments, but that's because the demographic of software developers is somewhat self-selecting. When it's nearly impossible to get a job as a developer not in an urban environment, people who don't like urban cities are going to self-select out of the profession. The high achievers among them will instead choose to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. -- careers that aren't so location restricted, despite ironically being far less amenable to remote work. I had some really smart and hard-working friends growing up, and all chose to go into careers of that nature simply because they didn't want to be forced to move to a big city.