Well if you were working in “endless cubicle farms” and “wasting your lives in traffic” then, yes, removing those two things from your life is a smart thing to

Well if you were working in “endless cubicle farms” and “wasting your lives in traffic” then, yes, removing those two things from your life is a smart thing to do. Being socially isolated from the other members of your team and only having VC is, in my mind, just as poor of an alternative. Imagine instead if you and (the majority of) your colleagues came to work by cycling for 20 minutes through green pastures, parks, under willow trees along the river, and through the centre of one of the most famous historic towns in England. That’s what we do here in Cambridge. We also do not operate a cubicle farm. Our office is spacious, filled with breakout spaces, relaxation spots, a library (aka quiet room), VC equipped rooms of all sizes, with a mini- and a maxi-kitchen and free snacks and meals. We come and go as we please with two days a week all together and frequently other in-office days for sub teams too, agreed by consensus not fiat. I often work at home in the morning or go home after lunch for the afternoon if I need uninterrupted focus / maker time. We have a personal IT budget for our home offices so I don’t need to cycle with my laptop (which btw is an Ubuntu Dell XPS, because our IT team know what they’re doing — you can have a MacBook if you insist.) Cambridge has gigabit fibre which is handy when pushing and pulling models from the A100 machines in our remote data centre. We still allow people to be as remote as they want and we also have a satellite office in London. It is rare though for the core eng team to not see each other in person for more than five days on the trot. It’s just so much more productive to build and plan stuff in person around a whiteboard, with pair programming, or in a war room.