Electronic Arts recently shut down Blueprint, a strategic project to enable the company to develop more software without onsite programmers. Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood is a professional programmer who lives in Berkeley. That makes him biased against cheap-outsourced-programer sites like Guru.com. But Atwood's hard-to-explain discomfort — and the war stories left by commenters — are based on an unpopular truth: There's no substitute for being in the office.

Contact information for this author is not available.