Running an engineering team from a hundred living rooms
The Valley playbook assumes infinite bandwidth and stable power. Ours had to assume load-shedding and UPS budgets. Writing culture saved us anyway.
We didn't choose remote; 2020 chose it for us. One week we were an office culture with whiteboards and shoulder taps, the next we were grid of squares on a screen, shipping a platform that schools — suddenly all remote themselves — needed more than ever. A year in, here's what actually mattered.
Writing replaced presence
Every process that secretly ran on "ask the person next to you" broke in the first month. What replaced it was writing: decisions in documents instead of hallways, async standups instead of meetings, runbooks instead of tribal knowledge. The surprise wasn't that this worked — it's that it worked better. Written decisions have an audit trail; hallway decisions have witnesses with conflicting memories.
The local realities nobody's blog covered
The Silicon Valley remote-work playbook assumes infinite bandwidth and stable power. Ours had to assume load-shedding and UPS budgets. We ended up with practical rules: cameras optional (bandwidth is real money), everything important is written so a dropped connection never means a missed decision, and a company stipend for backup internet that paid for itself the first exam-results day.
Remote doesn't create trust problems. It reveals the places where you were using surveillance as a substitute for trust.
What we kept
Offices reopened; the writing culture stayed. Output replaced hours as the thing we measure, meetings need an agenda to exist, and we now hire from cities we have no office in — which quietly became our biggest talent advantage. The pandemic forced the experiment; the results made it permanent.