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I gave a talk earlier this year where I went through all the reasons why partially distributed teams are very difficult ( https://www.kevingoldsmith.com/talks/distributed-teams.html). This thread brings a lot of good context and issues around the "tech is going remote" flood of articles. https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720
Seeing a lot of people making a lot of assumptions about how what that will be like. The truth will be a lot more complex and will be a lot different from company to company. Companies used to presence culture who allow remote will end up with the worst of both worlds.
I think Sid is absolutely correct. As companies deal with a post-Covid world and work the kubler-ross curve of adaption to partially distributed, most will go back to the old ways of "butts in seats" ways of working.
If you have moved to another state/city, don't expect much of a career path. Those companies use visibility as a metric for promotion (in the guise of direct impact/influence).
The companies that use this time to adapt to being fully remote, rebuild new processes and ways of working so that they are ready to move to a fully-remote culture will be successful.
This doesn't mean that you can't still have an office, for customer meetings, as a space for people who prefer to work away from their homes, a place for teams to meet occasionally. It is just that you assume that everyone is not there.
When there are meetings with a group, everyone dials in. Thing more conference booths, fewer conference rooms.
One hybrid approach that I've been wanting to try for a while and just started to get going at Onfido is the idea of fully distributed teams mixed with fully co-located teams.
Some teams in the org are fully distributed. Even if some of their members are in the same office, they act as if they are all working separately, and they can hire in any country that we have a presence in. The other teams are fully co-located and only hire into their office.
If you are on a distributed team and you want to switch to another team. It has to be another distributed team, or you need to be in the right city and be open to being in the office most days.
Still thinking through how a team decides to switch from being co-located to being distributed since it will be nearly impossible to reverse that decision once the team has been operating that way for a while.
huh, just wanted to share @sytses's good thread and add a bit of color and fell down the rabbit hole. Should maybe redo as a blog post... we'll see.
