> In the future I'd expect hybrid teams, where the remote workers visit the office on a regular cadence (e.g., once a quarter) for meetings.
I wish people wouldn't surrender so easily to the old centralized model. IMO, the software that runs the world should be developed all over the world, not merely by US west coast companies with remote satellites, but in a truly decentralized manner, like Linux itself (as Brendan mentioned in this post).
Edit: This is one reason why I'm happy that I left Microsoft to cofound an all-remote company; I'm back in Kansas, my cofounder (the CEO) is in Florida, and we haven't met in person in over a decade (when he was my boss).
How much of the active new feature work for linux happens in a decentralized manner? It seems like a lot of the time it's mostly a single company with a team that's centralized doing the design and coding, and then throwing it over the wall to be reviewed and accepted. That latter half is easy to decentralize, the former not as much.
Sure, any given feature may be developed by a single company in a central location. But in aggregate, IIUC, Linux kernel development is decentralized. It's not like a proprietary OS such as Windows, where feature development happens top-down (including the decisions about which features get developed in which office). For example, recall that the hypervisor built into the Linux kernel, KVM, was originally developed and contributed by a little company in Israel (before they got bought by Red Hat). They needed a hypervisor for their desktop virtualization product, so they developed it and contributed it. It wasn't part of any grand top-down strategy for the Linux OS. IMO, that's the key difference.
I wish people wouldn't surrender so easily to the old centralized model. IMO, the software that runs the world should be developed all over the world, not merely by US west coast companies with remote satellites, but in a truly decentralized manner, like Linux itself (as Brendan mentioned in this post).
Edit: This is one reason why I'm happy that I left Microsoft to cofound an all-remote company; I'm back in Kansas, my cofounder (the CEO) is in Florida, and we haven't met in person in over a decade (when he was my boss).