[wladimir]

I guess it's hard to pay for an employee that you never see

Then again we live in times with high bandwidth connections to almost everywhere, where video conferencing is easy, phone calls are free, setting up chat rooms is easy, distributed source control systems enable efficient collaborating on source code, and shared documents (such as Google Documents) are ubiquitous.

I'm sure a useful middle ground is possible, if companies were actually using all the toys they (help) develop themselves.