Alright I shall update to a belief that maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range.
What are all these “costs” that outweigh the benefits? I suspect they are easy enough to circumvent. My observation is that all the same tools being invented that make non-remote companies more productive (e.g. Slack) are usable remotely.
I’d still bet 1:1 odds that 2+ of the top 10 US companies by market cap in 5 years will allow more than 50% of their employed software engineers to work from anywhere.
maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range
I would expect the opposite. When you have 10k employees, it is physically impossible to have all of them receive the benefits of co-location to everyone else. It’s also more expensive to co-locate 10k employees with each other than two, even though most of the “co-located” employees are still functionally remote from each other.
I dug into this last year, and my conclusion was that either fully remote or fully co-located could work, and the real villain was hybridization.
As I indicated in my other comment every worker does not need the benefits of co-location with every other worker. The corporation desires that every worker be co-located with every other worker with whom they communicate on a regular basis. Teams aren’t spread across locations randomly, they’re arranged geographically by function.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there were no benefits to co-location, merely that I don’t understand how those benefits would scale up with total number of employees at a company.
It’s not that the benefits of co-location scale up with size, it’s that, to a first approximation, communication overhead scales linearly with the number of employees in a remote-work environment and scales with something like the logarithm of employees in a co-located environment.
New technology, such as e-mail or slack, in my model, doesn’t go far enough to address that disparity. I think there’s still a point at which the benefits of having everyone in a centralized office outweighs the savings from not having to rent office space.
Alright I shall update to a belief that maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range.
What are all these “costs” that outweigh the benefits? I suspect they are easy enough to circumvent. My observation is that all the same tools being invented that make non-remote companies more productive (e.g. Slack) are usable remotely.
I’d still bet 1:1 odds that 2+ of the top 10 US companies by market cap in 5 years will allow more than 50% of their employed software engineers to work from anywhere.
I would expect the opposite. When you have 10k employees, it is physically impossible to have all of them receive the benefits of co-location to everyone else. It’s also more expensive to co-locate 10k employees with each other than two, even though most of the “co-located” employees are still functionally remote from each other.
I dug into this last year, and my conclusion was that either fully remote or fully co-located could work, and the real villain was hybridization.
As I indicated in my other comment every worker does not need the benefits of co-location with every other worker. The corporation desires that every worker be co-located with every other worker with whom they communicate on a regular basis. Teams aren’t spread across locations randomly, they’re arranged geographically by function.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there were no benefits to co-location, merely that I don’t understand how those benefits would scale up with total number of employees at a company.
It’s not that the benefits of co-location scale up with size, it’s that, to a first approximation, communication overhead scales linearly with the number of employees in a remote-work environment and scales with something like the logarithm of employees in a co-located environment.
New technology, such as e-mail or slack, in my model, doesn’t go far enough to address that disparity. I think there’s still a point at which the benefits of having everyone in a centralized office outweighs the savings from not having to rent office space.