To Office or Not to Office

When I first met Joe McCann, NodeSource’s CEO and co-founder, he explained that the company was “Distributed by Design,” meaning they have no central office or headquarters. Instead employees work from wherever they choose, anywhere in the world. Going officeless is an idea that Joe, and co-founder Dan Shaw, are passionate about, and that makes sense since it parallels the modular nature of applications developed in Node.

Working with NodeSource let us see the flexibility of this distributed architecture first-hand. Our teams collaborate entirely in the cloud and members of the NodeSource crew connect from all over the world — homes, Airbnbs, cafes, even beaches.

These interactions eventually inspired us to rethink our work environment at Code Morris. Being in a co-working space, we were already only loosely tied down. Security, networking, utilities, even coffee were all managed for us. My biggest commitment to the office was the coat hook that I installed in the wall myself. We asked ourselves if we should just abandon our office and go fully distributed too. We could skip the commutes and save money at the same time. The idea was compelling.

We deconstructed our processes, figuring out which parts of our work were location-specific and which weren’t, what communication needed to be real-time, and what could be asynchronous. It turned out that our jobs offered a lot more flexibility than we initially assumed.

Part of this newfound freedom was due to Slack, which NodeSource introduced us to last year. Within a couple weeks, Slack had become indispensable. It not only replaced GChat, texting and a lot of unwieldy email threads, but it replaced much of the casual office chatter as well.

We realized that we didn’t need to be near each other to work together. Physical proximity became an option instead of a requirement.

Ultimately, we decided to keep our office, but with a fresh perspective. Letting go of the idea that work is about a being in the same building allowed us to look at our space with fewer assumptions and more intent. It was like discovering a company benefit that we never realized we had.

As the summer began, we experimented with spreading out a little.