"The level of success probably depends pretty heavily on the type of product you're trying to build and the resulting level of communication that's required. Fo

"The level of success probably depends pretty heavily on the type of product you're trying to build and the resulting level of communication that's required. For enterprise software (or perhaps I should say "domain-specific apps" or something), you really need a customer proxy/subject matter expert on hand that you're talking to on a fairly constant basis, because the developers themselves aren't really experts in the domain; as a result, you want your development setup optimized for high-bandwidth communication." I totally agree with this. I work in this kind of environment, where I need to collaborate with about a half-dozen (non-software) engineers on the product design, and working with them when they are/I am offsite is much more difficult than when we are all in the office. I inevitably spend most of the day reading and writing e-mails and on conference calls when this is the case, and most of the day working on the product when it is not. Five minutes sitting around a whiteboard in person dissecting a problem can often replace an hour-long conference call or thousands of words of e-mail correspondence.