I've always wondered about the efficacy of distributed teams. It's easy to see people all over the web that expound the virtues of not working in an office. 37s

I've always wondered about the efficacy of distributed teams. It's easy to see people all over the web that expound the virtues of not working in an office. 37signals comes to mind here, since they are always warning of how working together in an office is only distracting to productivity. I've found it to be quite the opposite. When working together in a group, everybody seems to motivate each other and work gets done faster. That's why founders who share an apartment that doubles as an office seem to be most successful IMO (insert marriage joke here). In the end, my guess is it just comes down to either team size or personal work style. There's no one rule that can be applied to everybody. Obviously, if you have a team of more than 20 people, being close together isn't going to make much difference since you aren't interacting with everybody anyway. The last line regarding having people brainstorm separately is particularly interesting though: "That’s because the problems of face-to-face dynamics go away: The “virtual” group is better."