
TL;DR: Companies that have recently gone fully-remote can draw inspiration from open source. Doing so provides helpful ways to think about attracting talent and building culture.
Fully-Distributed is Taking Off
Though the headlines have focused on the big name companies and their announcements about going remote, events of the last four months have undoubtedly created a lot of new fully-distributed companies you’ve never heard of. This includes organizations that may have been partially or even fully-colocated (office-based) before Coronavirus. And this is happening in part because remote working has worked out so well for so many of them, and in part because it has proven difficult for many companies to scale down to a “reduced” real estate footprint — to serve a subset of their employees. Hybrid is harder than fully-distributed, we keep hearing. And the truth is that returning to the office is still an open discussion (fraught with overwhelming emergent logistical considerations) even for companies that really want to.
We have also no doubt seen in the last four months an acceleration in the rate of creation of new fully-distributed startups that reject offices altogether, and that do not expect their people to meet physically to get work done. This was already a trend, and any founders who may have been hesitant before Coronavirus because they were worried about investor bias or their own inexperience with remote leadership, now have enormous encouragement to kick the office to the curb.
This means, however, that now many, many more companies, not just the ones that were already on the fully-distributed bandwagon before COVID-19, are going to face the challenges unique to fully-distributed organizations.
Continue reading “Remote Culture, Recruiting, & Open Source”