RTO: From Religion to Systems Design
Because holy wars make bad operating principles
Remote vs in-person debates in startups have the energy of a theological schism. Lots of vibes. Very little accounting. Having led engineering at Airbyte through a shift from fully remote to in-person, I’ve picked up a few hard-earned lessons along the way. What tends to get lost in these conversations is that they drift into ideology, when in reality, like any other leadership decision, remote vs in-person is just a set of trade-offs.
Remote: Talent First, Pay in Process
Great companies are built on great talent. Remote’s core advantage is simple: it massively expands the talent pool. Even with time zone constraints, you can hire people you’d never reach otherwise.
The cost is that context, trust, and momentum don’t emerge naturally. They have to be artificially manufactured. Meetings replace osmosis. Docs replace hallway conversations. Slack replaces tone. Team bonding follows the same pattern: in person you eat lunch together and build relationships by default; remotely you schedule offsites and Zoom “bonding.” None of this is fatal—but all of it is work. And it shows up most clearly in ideation: good ideas come from people talking to each other, and almost no one wants to casually brainstorm on Zoom the way they will at a whiteboard.
Remote is also meaningfully worse at training junior people. We are still waiting for someone to publish the seminal blogpost on how they solved growing new grads in a remote environment.
In a startup, time is the scarcest resource. Remote teams pay a small coordination tax per person relative to in-person teams, and that tax compounds nonlinearly as the team grows.
In-Person: Energy First, Optionality Reduced
In-person optimizes for speed, energy, and tight feedback loops. Alignment is cheaper. Intent survives the trip from one brain to another.
The tradeoff is talent optionality. You’re bound to a local labor market, which in places like SF is extremely cyclical. In the last five years alone, roughly half the time it’s been nearly impossible to hire (crypto, AI booms), and the other half merely difficult.
That volatility is the price.
The Middle Is the Failure Mode
Most problems come from unclear optimization. That’s how you get the worst-of-all-worlds setup: nominally in-person, functionally remote, culturally confused.
If you choose in-person, it has to actually be in-person. That means accepting reduced access to parts of the talent pool. That’s the trade. In-person maximizes energy and commitment. Remote maximizes access to exceptional talent.
Both are fine. Waffling is not.
Conclusion
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about systems design. Every model has costs, and pretending otherwise just pushes those costs into places you’re not watching. My intuition is that AI-driven smaller teams push the needle toward remote, but not decisively. Smaller teams blunt coordination costs, yet also make co-location feasible. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is be explicit about what you’re optimizing for, honest about the costs, and willing to commit. Ambiguity is the only option that reliably makes everyone worse off.