Statistically speaking, n>=30 is indeed considered a "large" sample, but that is assuming the examples are iid (independent and identically distributed) which is definitely not the case here.
If the effect size is this large, then n=37 is perfectly sufficient to assert that the effect exists; however, the issue is about sample selection, as "n companies from the Reach Capital portfolio" can't be reasonably considered to be a representative sample of all startups, so it can't be assumed that the conclusions can be extrapolated beyond the niche of startups like these which Reach Capital selects to fund, perhaps it depends on location or domain or size or other characteristics which affect what Reach Capital funds.
It doesn't surprise me. There is a huge advantage, in the first years of a startup, to be able to sit around with all the co-founders and early employees and exchange ideas as they come. Later on it matters less, as the advantage of synchronous communication diminishes once you have more employees than one office room can fit, which seems to be reflected in the research results.
Pre seed and seed companies are very small and very young, right?
This seems to be plausible: when you don’t yet know what you’re doing, your machine isn’t even built let alone well-oiled, you need very low latency, high quality communication.
I’m doubtful that this translates into the future much, beyond, perhaps, that companies that start well are more likely to do well.
It's also unclear whether it's a causal relation or not - it's also plausible that the startups who happen to be "more mature" from the very beginning are both growing faster, and also able to afford an office faster; perhaps that early office doesn't influence anything but is simply a consequence or side-effect of 'better startups'.
This kind of observation simply can't distinguish between correlation and causation.
Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient. Startups gain from the small tight knit team being able to do impromptu brain storming and discussions on the fly. Can’t do that when everyone is behind a monitor.
I am a firm believer that 100% remote work is actually a net negative for collaboration.
Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call.
There’s definitely a balance between in-office and WFH. WFH is great for corporate jobs cuz half your day is filled with boring meetings, but for start-ups, it’s the opposite.
Yeah I think the balance should be hiring people local to your office who are willing to go in (ideally WANT to go in) but also give them the option to decide for themselves when they want to be in office vs at home. As much as I love working from home, if most of my team was together in an office that's a reasonable commute from my home, I'd definitely not want to be left out/behind by staying home everyday - personally.
That might work if you're working on a very popular stack, doing something like web development on react etc, but anything more specialised then that (unless you're in the valley or somewhere with a big tech community), is going to be a challenge to hire in. If you can hire globally the talent pool becomes much more fruitful.
Find people locally that want to go in. Filter the rest. Offer these people remote? Believe everyone will have a reasonable commute in and use the missing out emotional trigger to get people back. Then they can sit at their desk remote into meetings with others at different locations while talking as loudly as possible while everyone else puts their headphones on and browses slashdot?
The problem with statement's like yours is that there is no evidence to support the things you are saying.
- "I am a firm believer that 100% remote work as actually a net negative for collaboration."
You're entitled to your beliefs, but they are just that. I'd hate to see companies making decisions based on "feelings" they have in regards to one format being more effective than another.
- "Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call."
I'll counter your anecdote with my own: I've observed no difference.
"there's no evidence to support the things you are saying, but they're wrong."
Is it really hard to believe that activities that rely on communication thrive in environments that support high-bandwidth communication? nb: lack of evidence does not substantiate the absence of something, it may mean nobody has bothered to collect the evidence (or that the evidence is difficult to capture).
It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to me. It was extremely dismissive. A simple 'but could you provide evidence?' would be fine. But no--it was more akin to "there is no evidence, your argument is invalid."
Maybe you didn't use the word 'wrong', but you did dismiss their opinion without consideration, and then proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point. So not only was your comment dismissive, but it was devoid of content or constructive conversation. Actually, the inclusion of the counter example actually made it the opposite of constructive imo.
Why participate in the same rhetoric you're throwing out, even for example, when what you're saying is already quite clear?
"It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to me" - altering a quotation in order to change it's meaning is lying. The fact that you interpreted what I said in your own way does not change that.
The OP's argument is invalid because there is no evidence. It seems silly to discuss that point further.
"proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point" - what fallacy is that? I never made any broad assertions and stated them as fact. I even stated that I was providing my own anecdote. The OP did the opposite. That is, they stated their anecdotal experience as fact. How any of this could be misinterpreted is beyond understanding, and is a you problem.
In my opinion, it seems like you are having a reading comprehension issue here.
You've fundamentally missed the point that I was making in order to take more 'technically correct' potshots.
Perhaps you should try to internalize the whole of my comment (i.e. comprehend it) before trying to reply again. Sniping individual pieces by being needlessly pedantic is--again--not productive to conversation.
Anyhow, I won't be replying again unless if you have something constructive to add to the conversation; I'm not interested in debate club with you. Perhaps ChatGPT is though!
And I'll add my own anecdote: the top performers on the 100+ software engineer org I work in are either fully remote or mostly remote. Losing our fully remote people would be catastrophic to the team. Collaboration with them is extremely easy, even from different time zones.
On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).
The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the ideas and conversations, not the drawing.
Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports, weather chat and complaints about the food by the watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to interesting ideas.
> On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus.
It's funny to hear all this hand wringing about the loss of spontaneous collaboration in offices, because in 10 years of working in tech offices in NYC, this was by far the dominant pattern: dozens of people sitting in a big open room wearing noise canceling headphones, talking to each other on Slack.
> Losing our fully remote people would be catastrophic to the team
you just made the case for losing the non-remote team and outsourcing everything to a cheaper time zone or even a cheaper country, because why not? after all, remote is so efficient. So why waste money on extremely expensive western labor?
> As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers
there could be people that, you know, haven't yet done that, like juniors or newhires
So... why can't a "good team" be assembled somewhere else that's 10x cheaper? Just like what happened to manufacturing, the Chinese and other nations actually turned out to have good - enough - teams to take a good chunk of the US market. So if I'm building my fully remote team, what advantage does a stateside worker have over Latam, or India, or some other location that has managers on the ground, tons (and growing) of Computer Science graduates, increasing knowledge of English, and in Latam's case, same timezones? Isn't that the culmination of remote?
It absolutely can be! Good talent is global (eg. I'm Australian).
But you suggested getting rid of the existing team in favour of a remote team in another country, because remote is more efficient. You lose more than you'll gain in the cost savings.
I'm fully on board with remote teams across the globe, especially when it means engineers can be on call while the sun is up.
Do it becuase it gives you access to talent, not because it's cheaper or remote is "efficient".
Australia is $$$$$ so for all purposes it falls into the same category as US for what I'm talking about.
In fact, it's even more of an illustration for what i'm trying to say. Let's assume all remote hurdles have been lifted, 100%. So, if I'm hiring for a new group initially based in Australia, what makes me recruit from a pool of 25mil people vs. 250mil people in Pakistan and 1400mil in India? Why in this case even have an Australian engineering team, ever?
The US is often 1.5-4x the engineering salaries we see over here, but the point was we're on the other side of the world.
My point was that remote teams across countries, and in some cases timezones, can work. But replacing a team just becuase you can get cheaper engineers is destructive.
Build a remote team on purpose, or let your team move to locations that requires them to work remote.
The point I'm trying to make is focus on the team and what's best for them. If it's a new team why limit yourself to one country.
> Why in this case even have an _________ engineering team, ever?
The same reason some engineers command more renumeration than others (in the same market), you find good talent and want them on board.
Agreed. This is common sense, and is historically one of the main reasons why business travel exists. A caveat might be that "pure" software development jobs where the role is mostly to just sit and code probably have a smaller benefit. But for most early startups, such a job shouldn't really exist because there's so much more to do. I'd be interested to see the analysis done differently, comparing how people actually spend their time vs just where they spend it.
A quick look at projects as huge as the Linux Kernel and its distributions (debian, arch, fedora), platforms such as kubernetes, apache, entire languages such as rust, python etc, databases (postgres, etc) shows this is nonsense.
Most of the internet is run on software built by geographically dispersed engineering teams working asynchronously. Software so well developed and innovative that companies as large and office based as Microsoft eventually had to back down and hop on the ride.
"Net negative"? So you're saying that remote workers are uncollaborative? If that were true, all remote companies would have people that un-talked to each other, which is hardly the case. Maybe less efficient, but certainly not negatively. It is the small difference in collaborative efficiency that allows different types of people and organisations to function.
> Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient.
That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth. Perhaps depends on your role?
Honestly, for all the companies I worked in the past decade, the ones where I had better quality communication were the ones where I worked remotely.
Then again, I'm a software developer. Developers tend to be good at communicating through pull requests, documentation, screen sharing and text-based chat where you can send snippets.
> That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth.
Because it's obviously true.
Communicating through pull requests is shockingly inefficient. It can take days or even weeks to accomplish what face-to-face communication would accomplish in SECONDS.
Why would a face to face conversation help? A smile is going to suddenly explain why you using a 7 character variable is jeopardizing the project? People are so afraid to confront others in person so if you talk to them they will just accept your changes so they don't have to deal with the person breathing on them anymore? I can see that..
IME face to face communication gives the impression that communication happened. The impression that a problem was discussed and solved. When talking people barely listen and just wait for their turn to speak and feel like they are contributing.
Written communication can be re-read, it can be looked at your own pace when you're focused. It can be challenged with comments and it's much harder to hand wave the questions away.
I honestly don't know why I have to explain this, it is, as I said, shockingly obvious.
First, the mega obvious: if I leave a PR comment, and you ignore it for several days, resolving the conversation will take several days! If I walk over to your desk and speak to you, now, that doesn't happen. Especially if we resolve the issue while I'm standing there, and I watch you type "git push".
Moving on...
In a Github PR (perhaps other interfaces are better!) you cannot comment on a line that wasn't changed. This can make it very difficult to point out problems caused by the way that added/changed code interacts with code nearby. It forces the reviewer to describe an outline of the issue, or paste bits of code and mention line numbers. It's possible to do this well, but it takes focus and clear writing. Folks who are not good writers, or who are communicating in a second language, struggle mightily with this.
...but if I can walk over to your desk (or you to mine), where I can point at the nearby code with my finger, there is no ambiguity. No need for careful English composition. No back-and-forth. I just point.
Honestly, have any of you in this thread ever had a face-to-face conversation?
Having worked on a number of early stage startups and projects, in varied remote/in-person settings, and currently fully remote, the only thing I genuinely miss from an office is having a huge whiteboard to gather around.
In my experience, whatever gains come from increased communications bandwidth in-person are kind of a wash with losses to focused work being in a distracting environment.
I don't pay attention to these studies any more. It's all endless shilling, scheming, and hidden agendas to strip workers of their recent pandemic wins (WFH). I encourage all workers to push back on this. Ignore the studies, there's big money behind it. Call out this bullshit, and call out anyone pushing this as a shill with an agenda. There is no objectivity here. The capitalists have had productivity wins for the last 50 years, time to give some time back to the worker.
Title should be: For Pre-Seed/Seed round startups…
There’s virtually no difference for Series A and beyond.
This makes sense to me. Pre-seed/seed is all about finding product/market fit. Which means high iteration, fast collaboration and that definitely happens best if everyone is in the same room.
Series A and beyond is largely about scaling, which lends itself to more asynchronous tasks.
I think there is also a question of organizational size. A 4-person team in one room can be a hyper-efficient cohesive unit, a lot like a family or a group of friends.
A 100-person organization requires very different processes, with planned meetings, emails, records, etc. All of that works fine (and likely even better) when people are remote.
They had 16 companies in this survey that were remote, 2 that were "office", And the rest were some form of hybrid. They considered anything other than full remote "some office". This could easily get skewed if one of these office companies had 10x'd their revenue.
And even though they grew faster, the attrition for Office was higher.
>> BTW, Nick Bloom at Stanford and others have done extensive research with thousands of people on remote and hybrid work here, and here…
^ from the article
> Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell.
^ from the linked paper.
…but hey, go the statistically irrelevant one to share with people if you want a cool link to prove whatever point you want to make with it.
You only get to say that when there are no other studies. If other good studies exist (which they do) then your study should add something. That means that your study should either replicate an existing study with similar or greater statistical power, or investigate something that the existing studies are not testing. This study does neither. It re-asks questions that have been answered with such low statistical power that the answers are meaningless.
> The survey sample size was 37 companies from the Reach Capital portfolio. That’s large enough to see patterns, but not large enough to generalize across all startups. Next, Reach Capital’s portfolio of companies are in education and the future of work. The revenue results by workplace configuration may be different in other markets.
But the subtitle of the article is:
> Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher revenue growth than those that are solely remote.
There is no world where "data shows" or "have" is the correct presentation of this size of a sample. Hopefully the HN mods caveat the title of the post here.
In addition to the tiny sample size point of a sibling commenter, this seems telling:
> almost 90% of the responses from pre-seed/seed startups said team culture was influenced
Building a good work culture is hard, it’s understandable that it’ll take time to identify and distill patterns that work well in a remote first setting, and then more time for the industry to adopt them. That doesn’t mean remote work is bad for employers, it just means it’s different. The companies that adapt will very likely have a strategic advantage in the future.
> In addition to the tiny sample size point of a sibling commenter, this seems telling:
I don’t understand HN comments. We don’t need to read a sibling commenter to know that it was a small sample size. The article repeatedly mentions that.
All the other comments are also of the same ilk, making comments about reasons why the study’s result may not hold, as if they are new insights and rebuttals to the article, but almost all these caveats are mentioned in the article itself.
One sees this in nearly every other thread as well. It’s almost as if no one even reads what they’re commenting about.
> It’s almost as if no one even reads what they’re commenting about.
For the record, I did read it entirely, but I’m tired of low effort/quality crap like this article trying to *splain why RTO is better and I’m making counter points not made in the source article to the article’s claims.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
YC probably has some really interesting data on this for pre-seed companies since moving from a required relocation to fully remote.
For new founders the value of being in person around other founders in the epicenter of your industry can be pretty huge. It's the questions you don't know to ask that are often the most valuable-- the overheard conversations, unexpected connections, and coffee chats that often make the difference between survival and death in the early days.
IIRC early data during the pandemic indicated that while remote work didn't impact productivity for established employees it was harder for new hires to find personal traction within the company.
Could it be that early Startups that are doing well are more likely to be able to afford an office? If all the graphs pointed to better performance in office I'd be more convinced, but only one does.
It wouldn't be an HN comment about a survey without noting that correlation != causation. :)
Assuming their statistics are sound, could it simply be that companies with good product-market fit can afford offices? Going full-remote seems to be a popular cost-cutting measure at some of the companies doing layoffs these days (e.g. GitHub), and especially pre-revenue it may not make sense to spend thousands of dollars a month on office space.
Additionally: For startups that start in a garage, like Apple originally, is that in office or remote?
This is too easy. Some forced office time means you have employees from a big tech hub working for you. Fully remote seed stage companies aren’t paying anything close to
paying rent in Sunnyvale or NYC.
If you broke this down hiding the office situation, comparing startups from Kansas or Minnesota to seed stage startups in SV or Seattle, guess who would grow faster
> Working from home may offer more distractions by chores, family, network issues. Do those little things add up to meaningful productivity differences?
When you say "more", you have to compare both sides. Working in an office "distracts" me with noise, questions by others, spontaneous meetings, socializing in general, as well as other interruptions. I find it always baffling that in such arguments, the office is per default fine, and it's always remote which is the culprit.
This. Offices are hugely distracting. All sorts of things to take your attention away and add the hierarchy element and your are obligated to talk to higher ups if the “swing by”
Plus they don't mention the commute time which can be a good palette cleanser if if is just the right length, but also can be a massive waste of time and stress-inducer.
Personally I think almost all of my distractions while working at home would go away if I could afford a maid or just had more spare time and energy for housework. So really the issue isn't "the home" so much as the fact that my home is in disarray because I have too much to do.
Just get a cleaner 2-3 times a week. As long as you can tidy first, they'll be able to clean stuff, and specifically get all the annoying stuff done (fllors, bathroom etc).
I've been WFH full-time for about a decade. When I'm at work, I'm at work[0]. I don't do chores during work hours. I have fewer network issues than the workers who work at the office do. Family doesn't distract because if they happen to be home there's another adult home too and they know not to disturb unless it's important (and they would be contacting me at the office for this same issue).
Are these idiots saying the quiet part out loud - that they're completely distracted while working and don't have the discipline to fix it?
I found that WFH and certain chores go really well together. The trick is to use the "get up and walk around" time you're supposed to allocate to push forward asynchronous tasks like dishwasher or laundry. You're like a human reactor thread :-). Then things like Pomodoro timers help as well.
Yes, but it will be incredibly misleading. You'd want to look at the distribution of outcomes to get a sense of what's really happening. The startup I work for is remote first but has some offices so we wouldn't count as fully remote even though we mostly are.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadSmaller and poorer companies to begin with will have lower revenue and reduce office spend.
It's really hard to account for all of these biases.
This seems to be plausible: when you don’t yet know what you’re doing, your machine isn’t even built let alone well-oiled, you need very low latency, high quality communication.
I’m doubtful that this translates into the future much, beyond, perhaps, that companies that start well are more likely to do well.
This kind of observation simply can't distinguish between correlation and causation.
What are the p-values?
Was there a study protocol BEFORE the data was collected?
How many other hypotheses were tested against the data? Were the p-values adjusted accordingly?
I am a firm believer that 100% remote work is actually a net negative for collaboration.
Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call.
There’s definitely a balance between in-office and WFH. WFH is great for corporate jobs cuz half your day is filled with boring meetings, but for start-ups, it’s the opposite.
- "I am a firm believer that 100% remote work as actually a net negative for collaboration."
You're entitled to your beliefs, but they are just that. I'd hate to see companies making decisions based on "feelings" they have in regards to one format being more effective than another.
- "Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call."
I'll counter your anecdote with my own: I've observed no difference.
Is it really hard to believe that activities that rely on communication thrive in environments that support high-bandwidth communication? nb: lack of evidence does not substantiate the absence of something, it may mean nobody has bothered to collect the evidence (or that the evidence is difficult to capture).
Maybe you didn't use the word 'wrong', but you did dismiss their opinion without consideration, and then proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point. So not only was your comment dismissive, but it was devoid of content or constructive conversation. Actually, the inclusion of the counter example actually made it the opposite of constructive imo.
Why participate in the same rhetoric you're throwing out, even for example, when what you're saying is already quite clear?
This isn't debate club. It's a conversation.
The OP's argument is invalid because there is no evidence. It seems silly to discuss that point further.
"proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a point" - what fallacy is that? I never made any broad assertions and stated them as fact. I even stated that I was providing my own anecdote. The OP did the opposite. That is, they stated their anecdotal experience as fact. How any of this could be misinterpreted is beyond understanding, and is a you problem.
In my opinion, it seems like you are having a reading comprehension issue here.
Perhaps you should try to internalize the whole of my comment (i.e. comprehend it) before trying to reply again. Sniping individual pieces by being needlessly pedantic is--again--not productive to conversation.
Anyhow, I won't be replying again unless if you have something constructive to add to the conversation; I'm not interested in debate club with you. Perhaps ChatGPT is though!
Neither side is bringing any evidence.
You can throw in all sorts of argumentation, eg remote people have more time, you can get better people casting a wider net, and so on.
But until someone does a proper study you don't know what arguments are backed up by data.
On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).
The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the ideas and conversations, not the drawing.
Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports, weather chat and complaints about the food by the watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to interesting ideas.
It's funny to hear all this hand wringing about the loss of spontaneous collaboration in offices, because in 10 years of working in tech offices in NYC, this was by far the dominant pattern: dozens of people sitting in a big open room wearing noise canceling headphones, talking to each other on Slack.
I have. Happens all the time.
> The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can be easily done remotely
Really? How? All the tools are garbage and none have the tactility of a marker.
you just made the case for losing the non-remote team and outsourcing everything to a cheaper time zone or even a cheaper country, because why not? after all, remote is so efficient. So why waste money on extremely expensive western labor?
> As I've already developed personal connections with my coworkers
there could be people that, you know, haven't yet done that, like juniors or newhires
They are distinct things, and knowledge workers aren't the most fungible things.
A good team is a good team, regardless of how they communicate and collaborate. Replace one person in that team, and you have a different team.
Replacing a team just because they're remote is phenomenally destructive, just like the layoffs are.
> because why not? after all, remote is so efficient
That's not the point of remote. It is a preferred way of working for a significant portion of the industry.
But you suggested getting rid of the existing team in favour of a remote team in another country, because remote is more efficient. You lose more than you'll gain in the cost savings.
I'm fully on board with remote teams across the globe, especially when it means engineers can be on call while the sun is up.
Do it becuase it gives you access to talent, not because it's cheaper or remote is "efficient".
In fact, it's even more of an illustration for what i'm trying to say. Let's assume all remote hurdles have been lifted, 100%. So, if I'm hiring for a new group initially based in Australia, what makes me recruit from a pool of 25mil people vs. 250mil people in Pakistan and 1400mil in India? Why in this case even have an Australian engineering team, ever?
My point was that remote teams across countries, and in some cases timezones, can work. But replacing a team just becuase you can get cheaper engineers is destructive.
Build a remote team on purpose, or let your team move to locations that requires them to work remote.
The point I'm trying to make is focus on the team and what's best for them. If it's a new team why limit yourself to one country.
> Why in this case even have an _________ engineering team, ever?
The same reason some engineers command more renumeration than others (in the same market), you find good talent and want them on board.
Most of the internet is run on software built by geographically dispersed engineering teams working asynchronously. Software so well developed and innovative that companies as large and office based as Microsoft eventually had to back down and hop on the ride.
That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a universal truth. Perhaps depends on your role?
Honestly, for all the companies I worked in the past decade, the ones where I had better quality communication were the ones where I worked remotely.
Then again, I'm a software developer. Developers tend to be good at communicating through pull requests, documentation, screen sharing and text-based chat where you can send snippets.
Because it's obviously true.
Communicating through pull requests is shockingly inefficient. It can take days or even weeks to accomplish what face-to-face communication would accomplish in SECONDS.
They are a hindrance more often than not.
IME face to face communication gives the impression that communication happened. The impression that a problem was discussed and solved. When talking people barely listen and just wait for their turn to speak and feel like they are contributing.
Written communication can be re-read, it can be looked at your own pace when you're focused. It can be challenged with comments and it's much harder to hand wave the questions away.
First, the mega obvious: if I leave a PR comment, and you ignore it for several days, resolving the conversation will take several days! If I walk over to your desk and speak to you, now, that doesn't happen. Especially if we resolve the issue while I'm standing there, and I watch you type "git push".
Moving on...
In a Github PR (perhaps other interfaces are better!) you cannot comment on a line that wasn't changed. This can make it very difficult to point out problems caused by the way that added/changed code interacts with code nearby. It forces the reviewer to describe an outline of the issue, or paste bits of code and mention line numbers. It's possible to do this well, but it takes focus and clear writing. Folks who are not good writers, or who are communicating in a second language, struggle mightily with this.
...but if I can walk over to your desk (or you to mine), where I can point at the nearby code with my finger, there is no ambiguity. No need for careful English composition. No back-and-forth. I just point.
Honestly, have any of you in this thread ever had a face-to-face conversation?
In my experience, whatever gains come from increased communications bandwidth in-person are kind of a wash with losses to focused work being in a distracting environment.
There’s virtually no difference for Series A and beyond.
This makes sense to me. Pre-seed/seed is all about finding product/market fit. Which means high iteration, fast collaboration and that definitely happens best if everyone is in the same room.
Series A and beyond is largely about scaling, which lends itself to more asynchronous tasks.
A 100-person organization requires very different processes, with planned meetings, emails, records, etc. All of that works fine (and likely even better) when people are remote.
Can’t deny that it’s a reasonable theory, especially for certain types of companies at certain stages.
And even though they grew faster, the attrition for Office was higher.
>> BTW, Nick Bloom at Stanford and others have done extensive research with thousands of people on remote and hybrid work here, and here…
^ from the article
> Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell.
^ from the linked paper.
…but hey, go the statistically irrelevant one to share with people if you want a cool link to prove whatever point you want to make with it.
And too small a data set.
> The survey sample size was 37 companies from the Reach Capital portfolio. That’s large enough to see patterns, but not large enough to generalize across all startups. Next, Reach Capital’s portfolio of companies are in education and the future of work. The revenue results by workplace configuration may be different in other markets.
But the subtitle of the article is:
> Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher revenue growth than those that are solely remote.
There is no world where "data shows" or "have" is the correct presentation of this size of a sample. Hopefully the HN mods caveat the title of the post here.
> almost 90% of the responses from pre-seed/seed startups said team culture was influenced
Building a good work culture is hard, it’s understandable that it’ll take time to identify and distill patterns that work well in a remote first setting, and then more time for the industry to adopt them. That doesn’t mean remote work is bad for employers, it just means it’s different. The companies that adapt will very likely have a strategic advantage in the future.
I don’t understand HN comments. We don’t need to read a sibling commenter to know that it was a small sample size. The article repeatedly mentions that.
All the other comments are also of the same ilk, making comments about reasons why the study’s result may not hold, as if they are new insights and rebuttals to the article, but almost all these caveats are mentioned in the article itself.
One sees this in nearly every other thread as well. It’s almost as if no one even reads what they’re commenting about.
For the record, I did read it entirely, but I’m tired of low effort/quality crap like this article trying to *splain why RTO is better and I’m making counter points not made in the source article to the article’s claims.
Irregardless of my intent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
For new founders the value of being in person around other founders in the epicenter of your industry can be pretty huge. It's the questions you don't know to ask that are often the most valuable-- the overheard conversations, unexpected connections, and coffee chats that often make the difference between survival and death in the early days.
IIRC early data during the pandemic indicated that while remote work didn't impact productivity for established employees it was harder for new hires to find personal traction within the company.
Assuming their statistics are sound, could it simply be that companies with good product-market fit can afford offices? Going full-remote seems to be a popular cost-cutting measure at some of the companies doing layoffs these days (e.g. GitHub), and especially pre-revenue it may not make sense to spend thousands of dollars a month on office space.
Additionally: For startups that start in a garage, like Apple originally, is that in office or remote?
If you broke this down hiding the office situation, comparing startups from Kansas or Minnesota to seed stage startups in SV or Seattle, guess who would grow faster
When you say "more", you have to compare both sides. Working in an office "distracts" me with noise, questions by others, spontaneous meetings, socializing in general, as well as other interruptions. I find it always baffling that in such arguments, the office is per default fine, and it's always remote which is the culprit.
Are these idiots saying the quiet part out loud - that they're completely distracted while working and don't have the discipline to fix it?
[0] Except HN during brain breaks.
Example:
Suppose you had one company doing $10 in sales a year, now it's doing $100 per year. 900% growth!
When you average 900% with the rest, it will skew the results wildly.