If you insist on co-located, you will miss out on plenty of good engineers who will just work somewhere else that is distributed. That said, if you have someon

If you insist on co-located, you will miss out on plenty of good engineers who will just work somewhere else that is distributed. That said, if you have someone in leadership (especially high up the chain like a VPE) who is all about "butts in seats," your distributed team is designed to fail. And I'd argue that that leader is probably doing their part to ensure it fails to prove themselves right about co-located being better.