Working from Home

I’ve started this more times than I can count. Including twice this week.

You’ve read–maybe you know first-hand–the benefits and drawbacks of remote workers and distributed teams. My team works really well, remotely, but that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and roses and unicorns.

But here’s the thing, the inescapable fact about remoties:

The best people can work from anywhere.

If you want the best people, you need to let them work where they want. If you’d rather sacrifice having some of the best people for the team dynamic of being in one place, you can do that, but you need to understand the trade off. It’s not the same people in one place or spread out.

A lot of the best people probably are in places like NYC and SF, just by the law of averages and the way the population is distributed. But not all of them.

You can pick “best people,” or “best people who will come work from this office.” You can’t have both.

I love my team, it’s a really amazing group, and I can’t imagine making them make that choice.