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No, for most of our projects, the test systems are small enough so that it's not cost-prohibitive to ship. I just know that every time we bring up a new system or board, there can be days of debugging stupid problems, and that's with everyone and all our electronics gear in the same building.

You say the environment was "functional". For you, did the advantages of having the larger applicant market outweigh the disadvantages?

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For me, it's hard to say because a lot of other issues led to problems. The project had poor management overall, and we were also dealing with language barriers and vastly different timezones. I think in our case it wasn't worth it because were located in San Jose and there was plenty of talent we could have hired locally.

So, if you're based somewhere crawling with tech talent and the nature of your product already attracts it, then it very well might be a net-negative to operate your team remotely.

Otherwise, I think you'll find it's worth navigating some of these setup issues to be able to hire the best from wherever you're based.

Fair enough. We are in Orange County (CA) so there is enough tech talent here to justify keeping our candidate search local. Thanks.

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