Smart Edge has been remote-first since day one. Five years in, a retrospective is overdue.
What we got right: hiring senior. Remote work punishes juniors who need osmotic learning and rewards people who can self-manage. Our average tenure is eight years of experience, and that's not an accident.
What we got right: writing. Every major decision gets a doc. Every doc gets comments. This is slower than a Slack thread, but it creates a searchable archive of how the company actually thinks.
What we got wrong (for a while): social gravity. For the first two years, we pretended remote meant 'no offsites, no rituals, just ship.' It burned people out and made the team feel transactional. We now do three week-long gatherings a year, and it's changed everything.
What we're still figuring out: mentorship across time zones, real-time pairing that doesn't require 11 p.m. calls, and how to onboard someone into a culture you can only see through a webcam. Work in progress.
