A note on this archive: an earlier version of this site was lost in a migration, with no surviving backup. This piece is a good-faith recreation of our writing from this period, not a recovered original; its date reflects the period it represents. See about this archive.
A year ago this month, the world sent everyone home.
I keep coming back to how strange that was to watch from where we sit. For years we'd argued — on this very blog — that you can work well with a developer you don't share a room with. We wrote myth-busters about it. The most common objection we ever heard was some version of it'll be too hard to communicate. And then, in about a week, every company on earth became a distributed team whether they'd planned for it or not.
I won't pretend it felt like vindication. It was mostly humbling. Because what the year actually exposed is that the hard part was never the distance.
The gap was never geography
The companies that struggled in 2020 didn't struggle because their people were in different buildings. They struggled because their habits only worked when everyone was in the same building — when you could lean over a desk, read the room in a meeting, or measure work by who still looked busy at 5 p.m.
Take those props away and what's left is the stuff that actually makes distributed work succeed: writing things down clearly, trusting people to manage their own hours, and judging work by what ships instead of who's online. Teams that already had that discipline barely noticed the change. Teams that didn't discovered, painfully, that "we're remote now" and "we know how to work remotely" are two very different sentences.
That was always our argument about working with developers somewhere else. The skill was never tolerating the distance. The skill was managing well enough that the distance stopped mattering.
What it did to hiring
The other thing the year did was blow the map wide open.
Once a role is remote, it's remote for everyone. The senior engineer you were quietly counting on can now take an offer from a company two thousand miles away without moving house — and you can hire in the other direction just as easily. We're watching people leave jobs at a pace I haven't seen in my career, and the companies keeping their best engineers are mostly the ones who figured out that flexibility isn't a perk you grant; it's the new baseline.
That makes where you look for talent less of a constraint than it has ever been, and how well you work across distance more of a differentiator than it has ever been.
Where we go from here
My worry, a year in, is that too many companies are treating all of this as something to endure until things "go back to normal." I don't think the old normal is coming back, and I'm not sure we should want it to. The year forced a discipline on us that good distributed teams chose on purpose years ago. The companies that keep that discipline — clear writing, real trust, outcomes over optics — are going to have their pick of talent. The ones sprinting back to the office to watch people type are going to wonder where everyone went.
We didn't choose the way we learned this lesson. But it's the right lesson, and we don't plan to unlearn it.