You seem to know a totally different set of engineers than I do. I work in Silicon Valley, and the vast majority of jobs here require on site presence. This i

You seem to know a totally different set of engineers than I do. I work in Silicon Valley, and the vast majority of jobs here require on site presence. This is the case for a very specific reason - the most productive engineers work best when they can quickly and easily share ideas with others. You would be wasting a significant amount of their ability by not having them around in person. The proof is in the pudding - every highly successful, well admired web company you can think of employs the vast majority of its engineers onsite, and those that are offsite are not core contributors. To claim that working in an office is "outmoded" is ludicrous when there has yet to be a successful case that succeeded with a team that is mostly remote. And no, 37signals and its dozen employees don't count as a successful case of remote teams. I'm talking about a venture funded company with dozens/hundreds of engineers.