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.
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.