"I've had lots of personal issues making a long distance thing work" Yes it is a problem. The best way it works is when you modularize your organization so that

"I've had lots of personal issues making a long distance thing work" Yes it is a problem. The best way it works is when you modularize your organization so that module boundaries are where the least communication is needed. This is how the business world works: The whole thing is modularized into companies, companies take ownership, specialize and communicat with each other mostly remotely. What most companies do wrong with offshoring is this: - They don't try hard enough to find real talent. They are just searching for random people. - For the low amount of money they find random sub-par people. - They find out these people are capable only of munadane tasks. - They offshore only mundane tasks. - They think it is risky to give ownership to these people, so they try to 'integrate' them. They don't give ownership to remote teams. In reality they could find talent and they could give ownership to talented remote teams. Do you know this? http://netfixprize.com http://netfixprize.com The top teams contained insanely good quality people. By far not all of the top teams live in SV. (While it is well represented.) "Finally, to be a great coder, beyond godlike programming abilities, you must have certain quality traits (too many to list here)." This is also a prejudice of american companies (I am not saying you have this prejudice) that people in the 'east' can be good coders, but cannot be well-rounded. 'They cannot see the big picture'. This is not true. I was a math and algorithm enthusiast early-on (I started programming at the age of 12). I mentioned algorithmic problems in my post because this topic is quite objctive. But otherwise I am not a young coder. I am 36 years old. I am an experienced programmer. I know the importance of good software design. Managing big codebases and creating algorithms: these are different things. I have a bunch og cognitive patterns in both fields. I love linguistics, I love philosophy and psichology. I am interested in interaction design. I am interested in business strategies. I am a very intuitive person. On the side I am working on my startup which is about how ordinary/business people can intuitively create and access databases. (I am working on something like Excel for relational databases.)