My company has a large development and sysop team in Poznan, Poland. In our case, one of the founding engineers was based there, and it grew organically from t

My company has a large development and sysop team in Poznan, Poland. In our case, one of the founding engineers was based there, and it grew organically from that. We now have almost 20 people there, including project managers. For the first few years, the product management and sales team was in SF and the engineering was in Poland, but there is a much larger SF Engineering team now (I am one of them). Most communication is via skype, RT, wikis, basecamp. Not so much via email, which seems different to me. We have the same problems mentioned in the article with the time zones and the requirement to do a lot more planning (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I feel that we are very agile for all that and are getting more agile as we add more SF based engineers who are comfortable with it. We try to get everyone sent to the opposite city once a year or so and this year we had an "all hands" meeting in Poznan. I have personally found it very beneficial to get to know the people face to face. I prefer to have everyone in the same room, but I think this arrangement has worked much better than a typical "outsourcing" situation because we are all part of the same team working towards the same goal.