I’ve worked in some environments that have tried to use a decentralized
development team.  Perhaps it was the way that they were
implemented, but none of them ever were successful.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we have a team standup meeting first
thing in the morning.  Yesterday, Buddy the programmer started the
morning with a personal phone call.  He was kind enough to halt
the call long enough to partake in the meeting and, upon it’s
completion, started the call again.  The call lasted at least for
2 hours, perhaps 3.  Today it was the same thing, except there was
no meeting to rudely interrupt his phone call. 

I understand that people have extenuating circumstances that will
sometimes require you to take and make long phone calls at work. 
Heck I can even understand that it may happen more than once and even
on consecutive days.  Even more against my ways is to listen in on
any call that a person makes, but when you’re working in a pod of 4
desks, it’s hard to miss somethings.

Today’s kicker was the apparent personal call (apparent because it
wasn’t in english) that lasted most of the morning.  Every so
often my ears perked up from the utterance of purely geek terms such as
connection string, ini and ADO.  Hmmmm I thinks.  This is
starting to sound less and less like a personal call.  So I listen
a little more intently trying to pick up any snippet of english that I
can.

It appears that Buddy the programmer wasn’t working in the office, he
was working as a remote programmer for some other project.  I have
to say that Buddy has some serious balls to pull this off with 3 of us
there that can hear him.