I think it really depends on what kind of 'worker' you are. Some people can take a task, go off by themselves, and work independently for hours or days at a tim

I think it really depends on what kind of 'worker' you are. Some people can take a task, go off by themselves, and work independently for hours or days at a time to complete it with little or no interaction with others. These people are highly productive in a remote setting. Others require constant interaction with others in order to accomplish much of anything. They need a barrage of ideas and help coming at them constantly and in every direction. While modern remote tools can help with this, an in-person office seems more ideal for this kind of worker. In the late 90s, I worked for a startup making disk utilities (PartitionMagic). I got married and my wife was doing a residency program in another state. I was able to negotiate a remote work arrangement with my company, even though dial-up connections at the time made things hard to collaborate. They gave me a new project to design and implement (Drive Image - a disk backup program). I would fly back to the office every couple of months and show them the latest version that I had completed. I did this for almost 2 years and was very, very productive. It helped that I was the only one on the team for most of that time (they didn't assign someone to help me until sales of the product reached several million $).