backtobasix

Yes, you can see the development plateaus earlier in recent decades. Teams that I've managed that are collocated are more nimble and ramp faster because in-person feedback loops all day long. I'm doing a bad job communicating this, and it is disappointing to see so much "well, i'm special and can learn on my own" which is something I've encountered so many times over the years (hint, it is a very small %age). The self-sabotaging isolation is astonishing. But as I said before, forcing people to commute far distances in cities with gawd-awful public transport is both on the OEM and on the car-centric USA. But I digress... All I know is: teams that are in the same building are 2-3x more effective than teams that are fragmented across the globe.

Except I also work with my local divisions, and the teams that work on the same floor near the same cubes are vastly more productive.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm here to burst the echo chamber bubble that "RTO is evil greed". There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you.

Some people just want to sit in a cube in code forever and ever. Awesome, that's great. But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.

There are ZERO online collab tools that even come close to the speed of a whiteboard.

Fumbling with a mouse to write a word or draw a straight line is 10x slower than pen. Sorry, I think you're either used to working slow, or strait up bs'ing.

You make a compelling argument for RTO.

I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one building. We knocked out projects at an insane rate.

Today, trying to lead teams over zoom, across multiple time zones, means it takes weeks to solve problems that took a few hours over a whiteboard.

If I was a CEO I would mandate RTO, but I would also make sure to colocate my teams, otherwise there's very little point to RTO when you're just calling into a Teams meeting.

Of course, the downside no one is talking about: camaraderie is real. If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it, but a very large part of team success is how they work together, and in-person collab is priceless.