I've only had experience with remote work in my programming career so far (and no experience actually _running_ a business), so I was wondering if someone more experienced could shed some light on this.
I imagine that requiring your developers not only to live in the Bay Area (and pay rent there), but also to deal with the BA traffic every day would substantially limit your candidate pool/increase salary demands.
What kinds of benefits are there to outweigh this?
I can imagine that other, more "creative" positions can benefit from spontaneous interactions throughout the day and whatnot. But is that the case for programming, which is much more a deep, intellectual kind of work? Is it enough to outweigh the costs?
I spent a few days in my career working onsite and at least for me the experience was that an astonishingly small amount of work gets done (and it's much harder to focus and do a quality job).
What am I missing?