Also see “Steve" Shirley, she build a company of coders, women only [0], from the '60s on with remote first :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
replies(8):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
For example, Tymshare, where I worked for several years, was founded in 1964. Their customers used Teletype machines at their own locations, dialing into a Tymshare mainframe and paying by the hour.
There were a number of similar timesharing companies in that era. Call Computer and Dial Data come to mind, along with Transdata where I worked in Phoenix before moving to the Bay Area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
I had an office at Tymshare's Cupertino headquarters, and a Teletype at home to work remotely.
This proved handy one year when the company was doing some final acceptance tests on the Xerox Data Systems (XDS) Sigma 7. The problem was that all of us preferred the competing DEC PDP-10. So the company really wanted those tests to fail.
My manager called me into his office one day and said, "This conversation is strictly between you and me. You are our best Sigma 7 expert [I'd worked on the similar Sigma 5 at Transdata] and even you like the PDP-10 more. But at this point the only way we can get out of the Xerox deal is if the acceptance tests fail."
I took the hint, and the acceptance tests mysteriously started going haywire!
Eventually I failed to cover my tracks well enough, and Xerox spotted my username in a core dump.
Back to my manager's office. "Xerox figured out what you were doing, and we had to tell them we would fire you. So, you're fired. But you still have your Teletype at home? And you have plenty of other work to do on the PDP-10, right? Can you work from home unofficially and keep track of your hours? Just stay away from the Sigma 7. After this all blows over, we will re-hire you and pay you that back pay."
So I did, and they did!
This sort of thing still goes on all the time. If your not part of it your either in "Giant Corp" or the wrong company, or you have the wrong boss, or you are the wrong person.
Many managers see a slightly more difficult hiring environment (for themselves) and completely fold to secure their own position.
EDIT: I've met many great managers, or at least individuals who seem great from the outside when the chips aren't on the table. But from the trenches I feel a real lack of leadership in Tech management in the current era.
It is much harder to get to that level of trust when you cant break bread, when you cant read all the body language. In person does make some things easier... One week a month of hot desking can do a lot for teams.
I don't mean this as criticism of anyone, but I feel like this whole multiyear discussion has been confounding for anyone working on any kind of multi-office team because it's such a non-issue in our experience. It has similarly been fascinating to watch the teams in my company that are NOT multioffice struggle with a distributed workforce. People aren't usually good at what they don't know, but, in my experience, a distributed workforce is absolutely something a company can accommodate with the right leaders and leadership.