Steven Sinofsky on Why Remote Engineering is So Difficult
I have spent a lot of time trying to manage work so it is successful outside of a single location. I’ve had mixed results and have found only three patterns which are described below.
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The first pattern is good to know, just not scalable or readily reproducible. That is when you have a co-located and functioning team and members need to move away for some reason then remote work can continue pretty much as it has before. This assumes that the nature of the work, the code, the project all continue on a pretty similar path.
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The second pattern that works is when a project is based on externally defined architectural boundaries. In this case little knowledge is required that span the seam between components. What I mean by externally defined is that the API between the major pieces, separated by geography, is immutable and not defined by the team.
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The third pattern that works is that those working remotely have projects that have essentially no short term or long term connection to each other. This is pretty counter-intuitive. It is also why startups are often the first places to see remote work as challenging, simply because most startups only work on things that are connected.
The entire article is worth your time if you’re thinking about building distributed teams.