Assuming you hold the number of timezones constant, what is the difference between dozens of offices and tens of thousands of offices? Or rather, under what circumstances are those very different?
To give one scenario where I don’t think it is different: if all of your contact is with workers outside your office, it doesn’t seem to matter if you drive into that office or call them from home.
But that’s just the thing: in situations where there are multiple offices, management does not assign workers randomly to various offices. Instead workers are assigned to offices according to some criterion that is a proxy for how much communication there is going to be among the workers. While there is inter-office communication, the volume of inter-office communication is usually much less (by several orders of magnitude) than the volume of intra-office communication. Whereas, with remote work, you lose out on the benefits of colocation, since every communication is, in effect, an inter-office communication.
It’s like a computer architecture problem. It’s much easier to split work among a few larger powerful nodes than it is to split work among many smaller, weaker nodes.
Assuming you hold the number of timezones constant, what is the difference between dozens of offices and tens of thousands of offices? Or rather, under what circumstances are those very different?
To give one scenario where I don’t think it is different: if all of your contact is with workers outside your office, it doesn’t seem to matter if you drive into that office or call them from home.
But that’s just the thing: in situations where there are multiple offices, management does not assign workers randomly to various offices. Instead workers are assigned to offices according to some criterion that is a proxy for how much communication there is going to be among the workers. While there is inter-office communication, the volume of inter-office communication is usually much less (by several orders of magnitude) than the volume of intra-office communication. Whereas, with remote work, you lose out on the benefits of colocation, since every communication is, in effect, an inter-office communication.
It’s like a computer architecture problem. It’s much easier to split work among a few larger powerful nodes than it is to split work among many smaller, weaker nodes.