Good distributed/remote development certainly doesn't happen without effort. I work remotely (9 hour time difference from the main team!). I was one of the fi

Good distributed/remote development certainly doesn't happen without effort. I work remotely (9 hour time difference from the main team!). I was one of the first people on our team to go full time remote and it was difficult at first. These days I have practically no problems, but it took us a year or two to get the bugs worked out. I think the main key is that you need to have management on board. It is trivially easy to cut a remote developer out of the loop. Any kind of petty office politics around remote work can sour the deal pretty quickly. Our biggest improvements came when management decided to transition from "Core development at the office with remote workers" to "We're remote first with some limited ability to work from the office if you want". That change in mindset made it much easier for people to make appropriate decisions. Since the company I work for is growing rapidly, I don't think we can even go back to the way it was -- we don't have enough desks. Management is loving the cost savings and even those that were opposed originally seem to be big fans now. We've even started having some of our call centre work remotely from time to time (which, if you know the culture of a typical call centre is astounding). Despite enjoying working remotely (and being grateful that I can), I've always preferred office work. However, with very few exceptions remote work is just superior. Communication is explicit (if it's not written down in an accessible place, it didn't happen). Work is inclusive. Generally things are more focused. However, it's really important to work hard on the social aspect of the job (because people can get isolated quickly).