Picking either in-office or "remote-first" is what matters most. Companies cannot optimally be both simultaneously. I'm Justin Gordon, the founder of ShakaCode

Picking either in-office or "remote-first" is what matters most. Companies cannot optimally be both simultaneously. I'm Justin Gordon, the founder of ShakaCode, http://www.shakacode.com http://www.shakacode.com. My article and video on telecommuting from Maui is still the number one google search result for "telecommuting maui": http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/05/06/remote-pair-programming-tips-using-screenhero/ http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/05/06/remote-pair-progr.... I've been a full-time remote worker from Maui, since 2007, a remote freelancer since 2011, and over the last 2 years, I've run a remote consulting and product company. To brador, that says "Remote devs start to have mental health issues from the loneliness and lack of supervision in down times", I'd say that's total hogwash. We spend almost every day video chatting on Skype with people (team members and clients) around the world, and we are very often on ScreenHero sharing screens (often with Skype video), and always on Slack and github conversations. There is 100% no loneliness with this lifestyle. In fact, I'd say spending 1-2 hours a day commuting is a far bigger risk for physical and mental health issues! Since I founded my company to be 100% remote-first, we've avoided many of the issues that face companies that are schizophrenic about remote work. I've heard numerous stories around Silicon Valley about how companies start allowing "work from home days" and then the senior managers see the parking lot 3/4's empty at 11am, and then there's an ultimatum that you have to work from the office unless you have specific management approval to work from home for one given day. And I'm NOT EVEN EXAGGERATING ONE BIT! One of the keys to my firms success is to hire team members that love what they do, either programming or design, and that typically interact well on open source. To that end, I've found almost all my team members though our popular open source, https://github.com/shakacode/react_on_rails/ https://github.com/shakacode/react_on_rails/ (1238+ stars), which is the number one package that integrates Ruby on Rails with React via Webpack and NPM.