Notes on IT Labor
- You can rarely pick the people on your team, or pick those that your team must work with and depend on. “If we had all the right people, of course all the right things would happen.”
- Putting people in one big room is a defensive move against the above. Open source software is developed by geographically dispersed groups (the word “team” is even too strong to use). Sales is driven by geographically dispersed, ad hoc teams.
- Theory: we haven’t figured out how to do software in business, on a large scale. It may be done, but it’s not normal, or thought of as “good” (by programmers at least).
- Theory: worse, we haven’t come up with re-usable ways to solve the people problems associated with not being face to face. We expect our geographically developers to work as well as open source developers, but it hasn’t worked out yet on a large scale.
- Given all that, your best bet is one big room.
- Is it true that technical skill is disappearing in the US? MSFT and others are always saying “we have to hire globally because those in North America who’re smart enough aren’t plentiful enough.” Is business skill is suffering the same thing? What skills do we have in North America?
Comments 4
Gee, someone a bit more cynical - say, me - might think that Microsoft needs to hire globally because those in North America who’re smart enough don’t want to work for Microsoft.
Posted 03 Feb 2006 at 5:59 PM ¶Good point ;)
I should also note that the original post was an outline that I accidently posted in the airport lounge. Hence, it’s roughness.
Posted 03 Feb 2006 at 6:56 PM ¶Interesting. There are 9 developers in our company, and two are remote. One works from home in the same city, while I live about 90 miles from the office.
We were originally all on-site, and I find the work culture did not adapt when I moved off site. For instance, not everyone was in the habit of signing on to MSN Messenger.
Compare this to open source development where everyone started off being remote, the tools, culture and expectations are in place to support distributed teams.
The moral of the story is: there is some effort and cultural change involved to set up distributed teams. The worst approach is to try to do the initial investment in a piecemeal fashion.
Posted 09 Feb 2006 at 5:33 PM ¶I’d like to hear more about your companies transition from being co-located to off-site. Feel free to drop me an email (cote@redmonk.com), or just leave a reply or trackback here ;)
Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 3:30 PM ¶Post a Comment