“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says the Remote Work ‘Experiment’ Was a Mistake—And ‘It’s Over’”, 2023-05-05 ():
…The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone, Sam Altman said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. [IMO most tech companies who rushed to full remote permanently made a big mistake, and the cracks are starting to show.]
“I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity”, he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”…Altman said, “I feel pretty strongly that startups need a lot of in-person time, and the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need together in person.” [cf. the Gervais Principle]
…“I do not believe in remote work for startups”, Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them.