I was in Bangalore in 2006 when I attended ThoughtWorks University and one of the things that stood out for me was the atmosphere in the Diamond District office.

It was really buzzing with noise and I thought it would be really fun to have the chance to work in that type of environment.

I don’t think Pune reaches the levels that I remember from Bangalore but it’s still quite a fun and relaxed place to work.

I haven’t noticed as much inter team communication in Pune as I did in Bangalore which is interesting and perhaps means we aren’t getting the full benefit of having so many people in the same room.

My overall feeling is that the office here acts much more as a central point for people during the week and they’ll spend much more time in it than I’ve seen in other countries.

The cool thing about that is that nearly every evening there’s people to hang out and go to dinner with!

I’ve spent the past four years working predominantly in co-located teams and had always heard that it was much more difficult to work in a distributed team.

I have worked in one team which was distributed between Melbourne and Sydney but it’s not quite the same as working in a team distributed in two countries with big time zone differences as well.

From hearing a couple of talks about distributed agile I was coming to the conclusion that big/complex projects would typically be off-shored since an offshore team could add people much more rapidly.

I haven’t really noticed that my current project is any more complicated technically or domain wise than others that I’ve worked on but it certainly has significantly more people than anything else I’ve worked on before.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do admire the patience of my colleagues in dealing with the slower feedback cycles/lack of face to face client communication which I’ve found very frustrating.