I don't think they were the best because they were remote, they were actually amazing because they were with really amazing people, and it's very hard to find a

I don't think they were the best because they were remote, they were actually amazing because they were with really amazing people, and it's very hard to find a lot of amazing people that also work well together in a single geographic location. That's why I'm also a huge proponent of geographically distributed teams - the likelihood of finding the best candidate for a team becomes much larger if you don't require the candidate to be in the same city as the rest of the team. As for whether those experiences would have been even better on-site: I don't think so at all. In general I think remote collaboration requires a set of skills. Those skills are becoming more and more prevalent as a result of many factors (the recent pandemic, younger employees having grown up with social tools like Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Discord, etc). If you're working with somebody that sucks at remote collaboration, then sure, it will probably be much better to meet them in person. But if you're working with somebody who is skilled at remote collaboration, then I have not found any downside to working with them over the internet. You can deal with people who are bad at remote collaboration in many ways. Forcing everybody into offices is certainly an option, but I think it's quite a terrible one. Training people on how to be effective remotely would be a much more preferable option for myself.