[pixelmonkey]

Spolsky said many years ago that programmers need private offices to collaborate and be productive. When I started Parse.ly in 2009, we couldn't afford them, but our team was already split geographically, so we just built a fully distributed team, instead. Home offices can make for great private offices, home Internet is fast, and commutes suck. I describe fully distributed teams in this blog post: http://bit.ly/distributed-teams

Now, we have over 20 employees, 13 of them spread throughout the US and Canada (all programmers). I actually just gave a presentation to new employees based here, "Parse.ly's Distributed Team: Open Source meets Open Plan": http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams -- it discusses some of the pro's and con's of our setup.