I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm.

I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here.

It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful.

At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.

My most productive ever was being in a room of 2-4 people working on the same thing. Small conversations were encouraged but anything unrelated was taken outside.

I wish I could find that again.

I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle.

Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.

Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.

This is actually something I'm cautiously optimistic about with the advent of AI tooling. Maybe we can make a 5-10 person company work for a much wider range of businesses now? I think it needs to be planned from the start, as all the pressure from investors and just the status quo is to grow headcount at least to an order of magnitude or so larger than that.

But I do think I'd love to work in a very small business (or partnership, or co-op) that is explicitly not trying to grow bigger than a team all working directly together.

When I got the opportunity to build out an office for my own startup, I had it designed with different environments: an open office in the front, a big conference room, a few medium size rooms (for solo focus, meetings, or temporary workgroups), a café/meeting area in the back, and a nap room in the quietest corner (with a couch). All the meeting rooms had a big screen TV to connect to meeting rooms in our other office.

So on any given day, you could pick the appropriate environment to work in, while still being within casual reach of everybody else for those impromptu conversations. and of course people could have lunch together in the café.

I thought the temporary workgroup offices were a great idea. A few people working on a new feature could move in there for a couple of weeks to get focused time together, and have daylong conversations without bugging everybody else.

Are these jobs at all attainable by people of unremarkable intelligence and aptitude?

In principle I don’t see why less clever people like myself can’t get together and solve less challenging problems in the same way.

"Opt in" is exactly what I expect of people when I need help. The closest implementation of your white board is me using Teams to DM people for help - when they have time. The expectation is they'd reply once they're free instead of instantly replying with a meeting invite.

I’m quite the opposite. Whiteboards are terrible. The most productive and aligned teams I’ve ever worked on formed on irc. We don’t even know each others’ first names.

Imagine if the Linux kernel took this approach.