> And, async doesn’t have to be lower-bandwidth. With even a modicum of planning, engineers can be set up to pick up the next most important thing if they’re blocked waiting on a response from someone else.

Sometimes! The hidden assumptions are that you have a backlog of independent tasks to pick up, and that most dependencies are well-defined enough that there's no need for a back-and-forth to understand the problem. I don't think those are crazy assumptions, but in the kind of company the author is running (a startup building new stuff trying to find product/market fit), neither is typically going to hold.

You make a fair point. I’m sure there are situations where those assumptions don’t hold.

But, I think for most startups, there is _so much_ to do at any given time that, in general, no one should be left twiddling their thumbs, especially with smaller teams.

> Tons of successful companies have done this since long before COVID.

Have they? I can think of a small number of majority-remote companies, but none of them stick out as being wildly successful. Of course, being wildly successful is rare enough that it may not be solid evidence one way or the other.

> Perhaps it’s more tempting to blame remote work than to blame one’s own leadership, or whether one has the right team.

1) I'm sorry, but damn near every online meeting we spend 5-10 minutes waiting for somebody that has to fiddle with their AV setup. When people show up 5-10 minutes late for real meetings, management is going to have a chat with you for wasting everybody's time.

2) Not everything is software. For example, it's still stupidly difficult to replicate whiteboard interactions with online technologies. And if you have any contact with hardware, the lab is extremely difficult to replicate.

3) WFH is not heading toward more async, it's heading toward more sync. As someone pointed out in the comments, being forced to be on a call continuously for 8 hours is starting to become a norm. At that point, I'd rather be in the office.

Personally, I’ve seen less and less A/V setup fiddling over the last couple years. Except when screen sharing comes into play. That’s still a nightmare for some reason.

And I do agree about the whiteboard thing, to a point. My team tends to do more long-form writing instead, and if diagramming is necessary, we use something like Monodraw.

WFH heading more towards sync than async feels like a cultural problem, perhaps partially rooted in a lack of trust if management can’t look over everyone’s shoulders. I’m sure that there are companies that are doing this, but I hope that this is not part of some wider trend.

> Except when screen sharing comes into play. That’s still a nightmare for some reason.

It was bad even when in the same room. Finding out which input of the projector the cables are connected to, adapters for vga/hdmi/dp, getting the laptop external output to work, ... screen sharing is resolved much quicker on average.

Erm, I haven't seen a projector outside of conferences in years. All of our conference rooms had gigantic flat screen TVs. HDMI just worked.

Although, I have noticed more problems now that Apple doesn't have HDMI ports on anything. However, we plebians outside the Apple ecosystem are generally still fine.

I don't think the jury is resolved on whether colocation matters for success; if anything, it's more common that the most successful companies are forcing RTO (Apple and Amazon), and I doubt they're making the decision on a whim. Google is ostensibly 3 days/week, and Meta has hinted at better performance for certain categories of people (new grads and new hires) when in-office.

Lots of people live to 100 smoking cigarettes their whole life, but that doesn't make it ideal.