“We have an everybody-together-in-the-office culture. Working from home is the exception, not a consistent practice for us. We are most efficient when the team is all in the same room together — knowledge gets shared faster and communication is better.
When everyone is in the same physical location, it’s easier for someone to casually ask a technical question or get feedback or get feedback on an idea, often during lunch with other members of the team. If you’re a distributed team all of those casual interactions take more effort, so they either don’t happen or they happen slower.
Communication is better because there is less room for interpretation; you can see people’s faces. It leaves less room for interpretation. It’s also really easy to adjust our path: because there’s no lag in communication, I know I can always get a hold of people.
That said, if there are circumstances where coming into the office creates inefficiency, we’re flexible. For example, if you have a personal errand that you need to run mid-day that’s close to where you live, by all means, we encourage people to stay home.
Personally, I think telecommuting or remote work is a terrible idea for early-stage startups, or any company trying to move fast and do something innovative.”