Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.
If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.
On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.
Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.
If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.
On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.
Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.