Remote Or Bricks And Mortar
When Chris and I started working together some 17 years ago, I lived in San Diego, California and Chris was in Littlehampton on the south coast of England. When I moved back to London in 2014 we established Analog Republic as a UK entity, became partners and had one big decision to make; do we get an office?
In our early days we used to use AOL messenger to chat, long before Slack or Teams was ever invented and we would have the odd video call on Skype. As we hired a couple of extra guys we'd set up AOL chat groups for team chats and started using a little team presence app called Squiggle that we later reinvented for ourselves.
When Slack made it's debut in 2014 at the time I was moving back to London, it changed the game for us, and when it came to answering our question "do we get an office?" It was a resounding "no!".
We had team mates in San Diego who would always have to be remote, and as we hired more developers, we were able to recruit from all over the world finding the best talent with no geographical restrictions limiting us to commute distance. Soon we had developers in the US, UK, Bali, France, Nigeria, El Salvador and Dominican Republic making Analog Republic a 24 hour a day operation.
Having someone online 24 hours a day was a massive boost to the level of server support we could offer clients, those tight deadlines where we need all hands on deck and the culture of the company. Bringing all those nationalities together, learning from one another and experiencing different social situations has been invaluable.
So while some teams moved to remote during the Covid era, we've always been remote. We love it, our team loves it and our clients love the level of support we can offer along with more competitive pricing without the overhead of an office.