You should seriously consider allowing your expert developers to telecommute full-time.

i even wonder why most companies won't even allow part-time telecommuting. often there's the situation that a developer has to work more or less alone on a problem for a whole day. the company has a vpn-access. the developer has a fast internet connection at home. so where's the problem?

i can only suspect that employers don't trust their employees and think that they will laze around the most time when working at home.

I agree completely. I now work entirely remotely - I have worked for some clients for years before finally meeting them. It makes it more difficult to get work, as most clients want to have face to face meetings (which usually means interrupting real work several times a day).

But once they get over that, they realise that telecommuting is a very efficient comfortable way to work.

You don't need to hire an expert in language X, you can and should look for expert programmers that are willing to learn language X

An expert can easily cross over from being a novice in any language in a matter of a few weeks

So you'd need to be confident that the job applicant would like Perl and its culture before hiring.

So what you're saying is, part of any job interview for a Perl programmer should involve getting them to join the CB and to see just how many silly puns they can produce in 20 minutes?

;)

Linux, Apache and Firefox are bad examples, as they don't have a customer with deadlines.

Some "face time" is absolutely essential when dealing with customers who are not themselves techies and are usually only semi-literate, as without it it is nigh-on impossible to figger out what they want, or to explain why what they want is a really bad idea, or to work out what the hell they're talking about in their latest bug report. If you never see them face to face, you can't walk over to someone having problems and say "show me".

In fact, even dealing with clueful, literate, technical people it can still be a lot easier to discuss some things face to face and draw diagrams for each other on pieces of paper. Compare the productivity of yer average programmer while he sits alone in his bedroom with the same programmer sitting in a room with other programmers at a hackathon where he can quickly bounce ideas off people, and where other people can overhear his discussions and butt in with fantastic ideas. Again, that doesn't matter for Linux, Apache and Firefox, because they can afford the extra time needed.

My ideal would probably be to work on-site two days a week. That gives enough time to cover all the issues above, with almost all of the benefits of working remotely. Most people who write code for a living aren't merely programmers. Almost all of them get involved to some degree or another in specifications, user testing, and so on. Those few who don't tend to be very junior, and so will benefit the most from spending time working with - being mentored by - their more experienced colleagues.

I go to London once a month for a face-to-face with one of my clients - it is by far the most unproductive time in my month, but it makes him feel better.

When you telecommute, you have to develop your communication skills. It helps that I trained as a doctor:

"Which pills are you taking?" "The white ones..."

"How long have you had the pain?" "Oh, a wee while now"

As for the learning from others aspect, I agree completely, and that's where Perl Monks has been invaluable to me.

You don't need to hire an expert in language X, you can and should look for expert programmers that are willing to learn language X.

So I agree with this point (not that I disagree with the others). I recently interviewed a candidate that did his programming all in PHP. I explained to him that he would work with a system I designed and built, written in Perl. So, "You will have to learn Perl, and that's one of the challenges I offer." His short answer was "Yes, no problem."

Telecommuting is also an interesting point. I joined a company just a month ago (the same company I did the above interviewing for). The distance between my work place and where I live is not so far, both cities are actually neighborhood. Thousands of commuters from my city are leaving every morning to the same city where I work. But, the boss at the company didn't mind when I proposed my term to work partially in telecommuting, and partially onsite. He accepted the reason that the nature of my work doesn't actually require me to be at the office.