I saw a social media post the other day. I wish I could find it, because I don’t want to take credit for this, but someone made a great point about “personal productivity” versus “organizational productivity”.

Let’s look at this from a different approach. When you are a staff developer, your focus is on your sprint tasks. You have code you are trying to write to get your sprint tasks done. And the most effective way for that to happen is probably “everyone leave me alone so I can write code.”

But if you are a senior, then your role is to look across all the sprint tasks that are happening, and make sure things are staying in alignment. Yes, this can be done virtually, but its more effective in-person. (Is this a true statement? Is it more effective in person? Let’s discuss further below.)

As you get even higher, such as management, now you are faced with looking across multiple projects and making sure things are staying aligned.

So here’s where it gets controversial. I truly believe that the more senior you get, the easier and more effective it is to be co-located, because those lines of communication are more efficient.

Let’s dive in and make it even more controversial. WHY are the lines of communication more efficient? What is it that management needs to know, or tell you, that is so desperate and important?

So the answer is one of a few things. Either they are not properly measuring the correct things in their standardized reporting (very valid and probably true, because figuring out what to measure is incredibly hard), or they are constantly trying to pivot everyone (also valid and true, for a variety of complex reasons).

If you work in an amazing organization with excellent leaders that have great foresight, can always make the correct decisions on what to work on, and can accurately measure the proper milestones and achievements from the staff, then yes, you can probably be 100% work-from-home with no issues.

BUT…

The reality is most organizations are not that amazing. Leaders, even great technical leaders, make the wrong decision and realize they need to pivot the direction of efforts. Business needs change, sometimes very rapidly, and teams need to change their direction. It’s very easy to criticize a business leader for wanting to pivot a strategic effort but it is also the reality that sales opportunities sometimes appear and evolve very rapidly, and if a client is willing to pay a lot for a new feature (or a bug was found in prod and it needs to be fixed before your biggest client decides to leave), then rapid agility is a reality.

And…and this may hurt your feelings…your singular development efforts may not be properly aligned. You might be writing the best code ever, but I have seen over and over again, a developer disappears for three weeks, comes back with a gigantic merge request, and its amazing code but just doesn’t line up and integrate with what everyone else is doing.

So bottom line, if you have a great team and are super mature in your development practices, then an all-remote team might work for you. (It does for a lot of teams.) But the pragmatic reality in the business world is that most teams have to have frequent communication to stay aligned, and this can be best when that team is co-located.