> It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people

> It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen. This seems to imply that remote teams don't interact with each other as much. I've found in my experience that pair programming on a remote team is actually a lot more important than locally precisely because it enables this kind of "magic". If you've got the right (free) tools, it's easy to set up an environment where you spend all your time on voip collaborating directly with teammates over SSH and tmux. Sure you don't see the other guy's face and can't have lunch with him (which is why as dhh mentions below that periodic team summits are also important) but the claim that you can't have the same level of focused communication is silly. There will be less cross-pair communication obviously, but it's easy enough to rotate up the pairs.