Ask HN: What are the benefits of requiring devs to be onsite?

2 points by oh-moses 6 years ago | 1 comment

I get the feeling that most jobs advertised here on HN are onsite, overwhelmingly often in the Bay Area.

I've only had experience with remote work in my programming career so far (and no experience actually _running_ a business), so I was wondering if someone more experienced could shed some light on this.

I imagine that requiring your developers not only to live in the Bay Area (and pay rent there), but also to deal with the BA traffic every day would substantially limit your candidate pool/increase salary demands.

What kinds of benefits are there to outweigh this?

I can imagine that other, more "creative" positions can benefit from spontaneous interactions throughout the day and whatnot. But is that the case for programming, which is much more a deep, intellectual kind of work? Is it enough to outweigh the costs?

I spent a few days in my career working onsite and at least for me the experience was that an astonishingly small amount of work gets done (and it's much harder to focus and do a quality job).

What am I missing?

probably_wrong 6 years ago |

> I can imagine that other, more "creative" positions can benefit from spontaneous interactions throughout the day and whatnot. But is that the case for programming, which is much more a deep, intellectual kind of work? Is it enough to outweigh the costs?

I'm not sure why you think that deep, intellectual work doesn't benefit from interaction with other people. There are two particular scenarios that come to mind in which personal interaction is a must.

First one: if/when I'm stuck in a particularly difficult problem, I can set a meeting with a coworker of mine who is an expert on the sub-problem I can't solve. For instance, I might have an algorithm that works but I need it to be orders of magnitude faster. In such a situation, nothing beats face to face and a whiteboard, as it makes the exchange much more fluid that it would be over Skype.

Second one: a casual "what you're working on?" with a colleague by the coffee machine turns into a 90min discussion on new ways to approach a specific problem - if you've seen this (NSFW) video from Silicon Valley Season 1 [1], this is exactly the type of environment that you only get in person.

Of course, that's not to say that developers don't need privacy - I think "a door that closes" is an invaluable resource for when you know exactly what you need to do and you'd like other people to leave you alone to do it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMeqEDEfniA