I once sat on an airplane for 20+ hours in order to spend a day in Italy. I spent the whole trip wondering why we had to meet in person when we have all this technology like video calls, email, irc. While having my surreal foreign driving experience where a gazillion lanes merged into a few and all the signs were in Italian, I tried not to let my jet lagged brain wander and I wondered what I was doing.
Why, when we have so much technology, do we have to travel so much to work together?
And the secret is to flip the question around. It’s because we have all this technology that we have to travel. Because we can communicate and work with anyone around the world, we do. And when you work with people, you need to meet them. You don’t need to see them every day, but you need to understand how they talk, how they hold themselves, what’s important to them, what makes them raise their voice in excitement. Once you meet them, you’ll read all their emails differently. You’ll get what they are trying to say in that pull request so much faster. You’ll be a team.
Once you’ve met them, had a beer with them and learned that they too have a five year old kid, you’ll be more likely to be willing to get up at 6:30am for a meeting with them. You’ll be more likely to tell them you think something’s wrong with their idea and believe that they’ll really listen to you. You’ll be more likely to ask them for help. Because of how the human brain works, you’ll be more likely to remember them in another conversation where something they are working on will go together wonderfully with the idea a new friend is talking about.
Meeting in person is key to working well together. Technology lets us work with more people in more places and so now we travel further to meet each other.