Nice to see Peopleware mentioned. Not a book many people are aware of. Unfortunately.

I read The Mythical Man Month some time ago, and it was enlightening. Peopleware seem to be another must read book, moving it up in the TOREAD queue 🙂

yes Peopleware should be on everyone TOREAD list... and I should re-read it... must have been over 15 years ago I read it... same as MMM. I once read somewhere that one should re-read it every 5 years.

I think the core problem with remote work is the trust it requires. It's generally a very difficult problem to evaluate developer productivity, so subjectively things like "being in be office" is perceived as "being productive". This whole benchmark, which has been ingrained in our culture, is completely lost with remote work.

As such, people that are unable to evaluate performance based on actual output (i.e. non-technical people) lose their only benchmark. That requires a lot of trust.

Yeah, I think I've seen evidence for that. If you can form a non-software company's first dev team (and they want onsite), and earn the company's trust, you may be able to gradually move to remote-with-onsite-meetings.

(And the onsite meetings may only be with a PM, not always the other devs.)

Yeah, very much so. Though it's a telling problem that our industry does not tend to focus on the actual value provided but rather 'feel-good' qualities.

There is something to be said for the benefits of spending time with your domain experts, if you are writing such an application.

That's a lot harder to do remotely; less casual elbow-rubbing.

Also, I have the feeling people tend to forget the disadvantage about being on-site like sitting for 8h with a few small breaks. Over the day I usually have different blocks of time where all I do is think. Doing my occasional homeoffice from time to time I use that block to do some homework. It helps me so much to get into some meditating work and my brain can focus on the problem without getting distracted by some incoming email, chat, blinking window, whatever.

Sometimes I even step onto my bike when I have the urge to move and give my body the freedom take what he needs without forcing him to stay still for another 2 hours

👍

The ability to manage your own time, especially by breaking it into pieces. Leaves room for good ol' hammock time.