While I was driving to work this morning I was thinking about an earlier conversation that touched on an earlier blog posting about the difficulty of having too large a skills gap in your team or in your development organization. We agree about the skills gap. Then he said something that gave me pause to totally reconsider my stance on remote development organizations. My stance had been that they don't work as too often during a project you need the high bandwidth available in face to face collaboration. But this stance comes from assuming there is a large gap between staff. What if the gap was small? What if gap was of zero width?
It has been my experience that you can successfully communicate and work remotely together when the gap is small. The eureka moment came when I reconsidered the reputed benefit of remote work that allows you to hire the best from anywhere in the world. It is not a benefit, but a rule. It is not that you can, but that you must hire the best.
Update, 2018-10: Remote Only, https://www.remoteonly.org/, has good information and references for both remote employees and employers.
Update, 2018-11: The 25+ Best Sites For Finding Remote Work, https://skillcrush.com/2014/10/10/sites-finding-remote-work/, has more information on remote-only job posting sites.
