The age of space/time misaligned work
In which we peer into how the pandemic put rocket boosters on changes in how people work together that had been set in motion by the internet decades before.
I have this vivid memory of one of my first ApacheCON conferences, the yearly IRL gathering of people gravitating around the Apache Software Foundation. This was around 20 years ago.
I walk into one of those giant hotel ballrooms where staff was settings things up and I see a bunch of senior Apache people all sitting around a big round table, all typing furiously on their laptops. Some laughing. Nobody speaking to one another.
I approach and see that they are all chatting on IRC. So I poke some fun at them: “how nerdy of you to travel thousands of miles to just sit around talking to each other like you normally do!”
“No”, one replies, “we chat on IRC because we miss those who couldn’t make it”.
“Moreover”, another pipes up, “we get a transcript this way and we can share it with those that are currently asleep”.
What look like nerdy antisocial behavior to me (a classic stereotype of capable software developers) was in fact a carefully established inclusion etiquette emerged by an internet-native society that had to establish new organization methods to thrive in a world where space and time misalignment was accepted as irresolvable.
I worked remotely most of my software career and while doing so I tried to convince decision makers around me that space/time alignment was neither sufficient nor necessary for effective large-scale collaboration. I never succeeded 😞.
Even while at Google (a company that has been consistently and unapologetically hostile to non co-located work), I have been allowed to work remotely because I did so at Metaweb before it was acquired, but I was an outlier, a weirdo, often perceived by leadership as a “singleton”, a rare and special individual contributor that can be useful even if completely detached. In fact, I was often doing the opposite: identifying and removing obstacles to building space/time bridges between teams across offices and time zones. Ultimately, I had to find leadership that understood this, rather than convincing the leadership I had of the value of what I was proposing.
Steven Sinofsky (who spent most of his career at Microsoft in very high places) recently wrote on Twitter about this disconnect:
It is said the pandemic pulled forward a decade or more of "digital transformation". Yes. But what it really is going to be is the equivalent of what WWII did to the corporation or the microprocessor to mainframe.
The question is not "work remotely" but what is the very structure of getting things done. We can't see it now but in 25 years corporations will run very differently. They will not be 3/5's HQ with everything the same.
…
The "why" is kind of brutal but just is. Changing corporate models requires wholesale leadership change—it will require people who grew up natively with the internet and with the pandemic and then become the CEOs. Just like soldiers back from the war to run Corps.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but “Hybrid work” in which “work from home” is more leniently tolerated is not this.
The pandemic showed that distribution in time and space is not toxic to collaborative endeavors, even at large scale, high intensity and high stakes. Although, it is no panacea either: the effects on mental health, burnout and mentoring deficits are unequivocal and require structures that likely don’t exist yet.
I don’t believe that “distributed work” is inherently better than “co-located work”: all I would want is for people to interiorize that McLuhan-esque insight that those Apache members showed me all those years ago: changes in the collaborative medium change the collaboration itself.
It will take decades for such insights to normalize and penetrate deeply into the structure of organizations, but I think the pandemic made it unavoidable.
If you have authority over deciding how people collaborate, I think you should do yourself a favor and hold things more lightly: allow more experimentation even as things normalize. I think you will come away surprised at how many unforeseen advantages embracing space/time misalignment will yield for your organization.
If not, some other organization will.
Heya Stefano! Great post! I've been working at Elastic for about 5 years and, even if it has a few offices, this 2300+ employee company is really remote first, in particular in the engineering department. This started from the opensource culture of the Elasticsarch and Lucene projects, and has been translated into company culture and organisation. And it does work :-)