From what I can tell happened to past and present clients of mine, there are plenty of bad programmers all over the place local and worldwide, and throwing more

From what I can tell happened to past and present clients of mine, there are plenty of bad programmers all over the place local and worldwide, and throwing more people at the job never fixed anything. If said company is having a hard time hiring a programmer but you have at least one available now meeting the exact same criteria they want, then that company really needs to rethink what they're doing. But having a 4-person team when a single one can do is overkill. Also on another personal note, my startup has one person who lives across the country (the US, so it's a big country ;) ) and I'm not sure how well that will work out. We've yet to even meet up in person for a drink or anything, and we can't hang out together to code, and I can't easily go over there to kick his ass (figuratively speaking) or he mine when necessary. In comparison, I pair program with my boyfriend occasionally when stuck on something or working on a project euler problem, and we both do our individual work near each other quite often and the interaction can be pretty useful. It's not entirely the same as IRC or videochatting, which I've done on one project where I worked with people halfway across the world. But again, this is my personal preference. I'd like to hang out with the people I work with, because strictly work can get sort of dull.