Does it make sense on the short term balance sheet? Of course. But, to quote Christmas vacation:
"Sometimes things look good on paper, but lose their luster when you see how it affects real folks. I guess a healthy bottom line doesn't mean much if to get it, you have to hurt the ones you depend on. It's people that make the difference. Little people like you."
* Longer distances with more variance in connection quality degrades meetings and shared whiteboarding
* Timezones can destroy productivity if you let them, and need managing to not be a hindrance. If you want to run a complicated bit of SQL past a DB admin first, but your DB admin is 5 hours ahead of you and finished work already, you pay the cost of context switching and picking it up again tomorrow.
* Even if everyone speaks English, having a dozen different dialects and accents in one meeting doesn't help with comprehension, even moreso on dodgy connections.
* Cultural differences can be managed, but if you've got people from half a dozen different cultures on your team, you're gonna hit differences, some very difficult to surmount. And this is magnified with the lack of body-language communication you'd get in person.
Again, hiring someone remotely in the way you describe might well make a lot of sense. But it's not nearly the no-brainer you paint it as.
