Thanks for a thoughtful answer. But the problem is not symmetrical!
Of course "no one way is right", but you're talking about a company wanting me to come into the office because a subset of developers can't work without other people around, whereas the reverse is not so - I don't care if someone works from the office or not.
I'm not convinced that a remote developer is less likely to seek help, but if so, this is hardly rocket science to fix: tell them, "If you're stuck for more than X minutes, seek help."
Indeed, I feel that asking for help remotely is a better experience. I start to formulate my problem in chat, and I add material to it as I go. About half the time, I figure out the issue simply in the course of preparing the question itself.
From the other side, I can often give someone a quick answer involving gathering more information about the project, and then get back to work for another five minutes while they put it together, rather than standing over someone while they nervously search through their system for these answers.
As someone who ends up being a good question-answerer, in a conventional office I lose a huge amount of productivity being interrupted. Some large portion of my bugs stem from this, where something is unfinished when I get interrupted and I forget to finish it.
Don't get me wrong - I love answering questions! People always comment how responsive I am remotely, but simply the fact I can take 30 seconds to five minutes to make sure I am in a "good state" before answering people's questions makes all the difference to me. More, the ability for me to take an extra minute or so to do research means I give better answers to questions, and this is research I don't do when someone is standing over me with a question.
And the other reason that the problem is not symmetrical is that renting an office is not cheap in terms of money, and going to the office is not cheap in terms of time. You're paying a large premium in terms of human time, and hard cash,
If those developers who need other people around to feel fulfilled had to take a 10-15% pay cut to account for the cost of an office (facilities costs are expensive!), I think a lot of these people might change their tunes rather quickly.
Thanks again, and have a great weekend!
