Description: Agile-Thing-Doer, Conference Speaker, Security-Dabbler, Occasional Inventor, Technology-Lover, Irregular Writer, Game-Geeker, Motorcyclist. Also slightly mad.
Having worked in a few distributed teams my experience has been that with large disparate time zones, with people either getting up very early or having to stay in very late, working together can be very painful.
From my perspective working on complex, emergent solutions that require a lot of communication and free expression being co-located is the most conductive and least inhibiting way to work. Sure, on paper there are technical solutions for pretty much everything, though there is one thing they did not solve: Human nature.
From what I know Humans are “designed” to work best in direct interaction. Expressing, finding, establishing and maintaining shared values and a unified vision is something that has shown, at least for me, to be very time-consuming and costly trying to do it remotely. Especially if you’re working with a new team the issues of trust, prejudices, fear of looking stupid and general unease can take weeks and months to be resolved, if they can be resolved at all.