You can write code remotely (probably even better than you would in an office) and you can deliver and debug and do maintenance remotely, but it's very hard to

You can write code remotely (probably even better than you would in an office) and you can deliver and debug and do maintenance remotely, but it's very hard to do politics remotely. When it comes to convincing people, the person or team on the scene has a built-in advantage over the disembodied person on the phone or the net. This is just human nature. Monkeys gotta monkey. Yes, yes, it used to be that the person on the scene had a much bigger advantage, and now thanks to our awesome telepresence technology the advantage is smaller than it used to be. Whatever. The advantage is still there. Blame time zones, blame the limited field-of-view of cameras, blame subtle sounds that only locals can hear, blame the fact that it's easier to establish rapport by talking about the weather when everyone is experiencing the same weather, blame out-of-band signaling of every sort, from sharing the same pizza at lunch to sharing the same hallways and parking lots to sharing the same air. You can fight this by deliberately leveling the playing field: Force everyone to be remote most of the time, from day one. 37signals built their company this way. (And they also attracted and hired excellent writers; that's not a coincidence.) But if you don't foster that culture from day one it is hard to bolt on after the fact. Particularly because the culture of written communication and the level of writing skill needed to make remote interaction work doesn't arise overnight and doesn't grow on trees. You need to practice being an effective distributed organization. And the problems with being remote won't always be obvious - indeed, as I said up front, the code may well be better, because offices are such unproductive workspaces. But the problems will arise when politics arise, as they do in any group larger than a given size. It will be harder to move up or around in the organization. It will be harder to sell ideas to co-workers from other departments, the ones who don't work with you everyday, because the social grooming is so difficult. It's not just because of tax law that most remote workers tend to be contractors, and that so many contractors dream of starting small product businesses. The culture of business-to-business contracting is better adapted to working in writing and over distances, because there's several hundred years of cultural experience to draw upon: We have contracts, we have lawyers, we put stuff in writing. Selling a product to someone through the mail is even more formalized: People expect to read brochures, to get the product in a circumscribed package, to sign a contract and pay by the hour before putting in a tech support ticket. Contrast all this with the employee-employee relationship, which tends to be egalitarian and communal and rely a lot on subtle mutual teambuilding and backscratching that are difficult to virtualize.