While I agree that good engineers should be able to do all of the things on your list, I don't agree that a distributed team is necessarily a huge barrier to al

While I agree that good engineers should be able to do all of the things on your list, I don't agree that a distributed team is necessarily a huge barrier to all those things. I work with such a team, and we're in constant contact. I teach, learn, coordinate, discuss design, and communicate insights via IRC and Skype. We're signed in and talking at pretty much all hours. We talk about the piece of code we're working on at the moment, we talk about what we're about to do, we ask for design feedback, we bitch about terrible dependencies, everything. If you're talking about the kind of remote workers who fire off a couple e-mails and maybe jump on skype for 20 minutes a day, then I agree. That just isn't conducive to good, cohesive work. It also wouldn't fly on our team. I think it needs to be recognized that (especially with the right team) distributed work and throwing development over the wall to a random offshore company are _nowhere_ near the same thing. If they are, then the team clearly isn't good at remoting and, as you say, probably need to be physically present. Good engineers should be able to do either well, not just one or the other; and a good team should be able to do everything on your list with either work arrangement.