Yeah Remote teams are not simple. My view is there will more remote workers(not teams) after the Pandemic than before.
Hard to predict the split between remote vs non remote but as you said we will find out after people are back in office.
Are you saying this based on some internal survey from companies?
I worked writing software in C/C++ running on a Posix based OS running on Custom hardware, using both a simulator and emulator and finally custom hardware. I couldnāt get answers from people within the same company, forget stackoverflow, so yeah I get that part of it. 
But again what % of the workforce of each company work on this scale and proprietary tech?
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My personal experience and extended team and leadership. No other survey Iāve read about it. But this is the general belief about communication bandwidth Chat < Voice < Video < Face-to-Face.
For Facebook / Google, majority of the employees. But obviously, there are lot other companies out there.
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We are daily having night time(pst) calls with overseas developers for the last 20 years and effectively it is working for many big companiesā¦such as FB, GOOGL, AMZNā¦etc. In this onsite - offshore models, there is no whiteboard, everything excel and over internet.
It was this myth, many managers had it before Coronovirus WFH policy. Now, it is proved that it can work effectively without whiteboard session.
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Every company with significant code base will find it difficult to ramp people up remotely. Often these custom framework or codebase has bad or even nonexistent documentation. Sometimes new people are so lost they donāt even know what questions to ask. I surely remember I was like that in my early days.
Existing teams can work remotely for a while. We are seeing problems first emerge with new members and hardware companies. But purely software teams will see issues later too. We havenāt even scratched the surface of the slowdown in decision making.
Companies donāt see a lot of issue right now because everybody else has to deal with the same issues. But Asia is already back to office. Soon Europe will do too. American companies will be at a distinct disadvantage if we still have to be remote while everybody else is racing ahead.
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Personally I know of quite a few people working for many(15+ years) in software in companies such as Oracle and others(including semiconductor engineers working in semiconductor companies) who have team members distributed throughout the US and in some cases across different continents.
Having said that itās true that might not work for some companies.
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If you havenāt done whiteboard session before with this same team, how would you know whiteboard is not more effective? Your 30 mins call over spreadsheet could have concluded in 15 mins. I am not saying it canāt be done, it is all relative.
Yea, not just companies, it is people who needs to get adjusted. Either we like it or not, more companies are going to favor remote employees. Could be couple of days a week to permanent, in same to different timezones. Our work style will get adjusted and technology will make it easier. We just donāt know whatās the scale going to impact all of us.
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I agree it may be effective, but the cost of offshore is 1/5th of onsite, some cases 1/10th of onsite.
During 2003-2004, intuit had 120 onsite (each $100k /year) . We were given project replacing the entire team. I was having just 6 onsite and 40 offshore team members as first 3 months, then 5 onsite and 20 offshore second 3 months.
Did those team members start out as remote only? Or did they work in the office with rest of the team for a number of years before leaving to be fully remote?
None of them started out as remote only.
Thatās why I am saying that article from wsj applies to specific types of work(semiconductor,robotics,custom hardware,large scale & proprietary software AND newbies among many).
Unless a software company works on open source, all of them have proprietary code. The bigger the company the more LOC and more complex their proprietary codebase is. Most of them have shockingly bad documentation.
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My experience is when your compilers to linkers to debuggers are heavily customized and hardware on which youāre running code is proprietary then the dev system in my view is proprietary. From @boolean 's example proprietary code is to deal with the scale that some companies face.
Anyways, the argument is moot as I said I know quite a few ppl who work remote and coincidentally they also make a (LOT of money). Iāll give you an example one of them I know has hired/s people right out of school for $180K.
Point is the company would not keep paying that kind of money(to the hiring manager/s - since he makes much more than the person he hired for $180K) if the hiring managerās remote work was not effective.
I also knew people working completely remotely in another state/country back in my days. The crust of the argument is this: will these be exceptions like before Covid, or will they become the new normal?
If most of the grey breads who know where the skeletons are buried in the codebase are themselves working remotely, where do newbies turn to ask questions?
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SVās cutting edge AI and Data Science should in theory answer this question.
But in our case weāll have to depend on more traditional ways and wait to see what actually happens.
Btw, these people are early 40s to mid 40s people. Itās possible that some people do get grey beard early
this small number for Indian market. India also makes auto mobiles, bikes, parts but they dont have scale for global operations. No southern states be in Africa or India or Indonesia/Vietnam can replace Northern Countriesā¦ They can assemble some stuff from parts supplied. No full cycle manufacturing.
Itās not like they work in total isolation unable to contact anyone. Weāve created even more channels in slack, so each community of users has one. Thereās one for each software tool we use, and one for each product we develop. That way people can get answers quickly. Each channel has experts who look after it. Itās no different than mentoring in person or stopping by someoneās desk. Teams have also created office hours to allow people to drop by and ask questions. Our usage of Udemy is up, so people are using that to bridge gaps. I have a couple classes I use as references when I need to lookup something I havenāt used in awhile or learn something new.
I think most people in tech are used to teaching themselves things and figuring it out. Thatās what engineers do.
The good thing about 2 week sprints is itās impossible to get too far off on the wrong direction. The feedback mechanisms are much faster, so course correction is much faster.
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For most part, in tech world, code itself is a documentation.
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In work-at-office environment, a lot of poor communicators, including the non-communicators who answer only when you ask were able to survive. WFH will favor good communicators.
Also, companies like Google / Facebook canāt rely on Stakeoverflow for answers either due to proprietary tech issue or nobody out there has problem of their scale.
Stackoverflow community may be good to get answers on questions related to coding techniques and practices. Can a company resolves Issues related to product architecture, management, scheduling, integration outside a tight organization?