4 ms·

Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and

Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and utilize tools and methods to manage them. There is an entire middle management class in Silicon Valley that exists to manage engineers in person. Their day consists of many meetings, meetings with their team, cross-functional teams, visiting you and your co-workers in your office/cube and managing your work flow. Their work is not without value. This model has produced most of the software and hardware that we use daily. When you introduce remote teams, you introduce a type of friction that does not work with this model. All of sudden managers are not able to call an in-person meeting. They have to get up early or stay up late to coordinate. There is a perception that the remote team is slow, or not responsive. I have been in meetings at Apple where Steve would excoriate teams in France for not moving as fast as he wanted. This was not the case, but he could not micro-manage them in person. The future is going to belong to companies that can master processes and technologies to coordinate teams across time zones, languages and countries. Warehousing employees in Mountain View, Cupertino, South Lake Union, Manhattan, Frankfurt, etc. seems ridiculous once you begin to understand how to co-ordinate dispersed teams. There is value in having teams work together and I like working in person with other people. The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers.

hnfong 5y ago
> The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers. I wonder whether it's mostly risk aversion rather than an intentional "feature". The execs of FAANG _know_ that if they spend more money and put more people to work on adding features, acquiring users and expanding to under developed markets, they'll more-or-less reliably rake in billions for themselves and the company. Most companies are experiencing double digit growth, so the upsides of decentralizing the offices is limited (even if say you reduce 50% of staffing costs, it's still not that great of a deal compared with potential lost growth and lost profits), and since nobody else has done it on a large scale before, the risks are (perceived to be) high and nobody wants to risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

hnfong 5y ago

> The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers. I wonder whether it's mostly risk aversion rather than an intentional "feature". The execs of FAANG _know_ that if they spend more money and put more people to work on adding features, acquiring users and expanding to under developed markets, they'll more-or-less reliably rake in billions for themselves and the company. Most companies are experiencing double digit growth, so the upsides of decentralizing the offices is limited (even if say you reduce 50% of staffing costs, it's still not that great of a deal compared with potential lost growth and lost profits), and since nobody else has done it on a large scale before, the risks are (perceived to be) high and nobody wants to risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs.