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.
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.