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Most communication in an office still takes place virtually just as you do remotely. Within a company located in the same physical area you might communicate a

Most communication in an office still takes place virtually just as you do remotely. Within a company located in the same physical area you might communicate across floors, across buildings, across campuses. Yes it is nice to have small groups together on regular basis in meetings, integration sessions, brainstorming but for the most part jobs are virtual even in an office today with chat, email, text, phones, video chat, etc. Everyone in one location is both a single point of failure and doesn't scale well to employees changes, i.e. people move frequently, skill is available in different technologies not always in one location, etc. Better virtual communication in companies even on-site is needed, being in one place without that can actually put a damper on performance and ability to ship.

Johnny555 9y ago
Yet the evidence from major tech companies suggests that physical presence is worth the time and expense to bus most employees to a central campus. Apple is spending $5B on their new building to house 13,000 employees together. Amazon is committing $5B to their new campus to house 50,000 employees.
- mcbits 9y ago
  There is evidence that they haven't reached their limits with vertical scaling as Amazon apparently has.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    I think Amazon has reached the limits of Seattle -- Seattle can't build housing or transportation fast enough to match Amazon's growth, so starting somewhere fresh makes sense. Plus there's the redundancy benefit -- if the Pacific Northwest suffers the catastrophic earthquake they are predicting, Amazon's HQ2 will live on (and make a fortune shipping supplies to the area).
    - mcbits 9y ago
      Building a second HQ is horizontal scaling unless they plan to consolidate at the new location and continue vertical scaling from there. It sounds like they're actually distributing the HQ across two locations, not just building a specialized satellite office. (All of the mentioned companies have those.) If computing works as an analogy, decoupling a system enough to spread across two servers without one being the true master/head is already half the battle. But you'd rarely design a distributed system only to run it on two servers. The synchronization overhead wipes out most of the gains. Once you have the architecture, you might as well move to commodity servers that are collectively cheaper and more powerful than two top-of-the-line servers. I wonder if there is an organizational equivalent of the CAP theorem.

Johnny555 9y ago

Yet the evidence from major tech companies suggests that physical presence is worth the time and expense to bus most employees to a central campus. Apple is spending $5B on their new building to house 13,000 employees together. Amazon is committing $5B to their new campus to house 50,000 employees.

mcbits 9y ago
There is evidence that they haven't reached their limits with vertical scaling as Amazon apparently has.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  I think Amazon has reached the limits of Seattle -- Seattle can't build housing or transportation fast enough to match Amazon's growth, so starting somewhere fresh makes sense. Plus there's the redundancy benefit -- if the Pacific Northwest suffers the catastrophic earthquake they are predicting, Amazon's HQ2 will live on (and make a fortune shipping supplies to the area).
  - mcbits 9y ago
    Building a second HQ is horizontal scaling unless they plan to consolidate at the new location and continue vertical scaling from there. It sounds like they're actually distributing the HQ across two locations, not just building a specialized satellite office. (All of the mentioned companies have those.) If computing works as an analogy, decoupling a system enough to spread across two servers without one being the true master/head is already half the battle. But you'd rarely design a distributed system only to run it on two servers. The synchronization overhead wipes out most of the gains. Once you have the architecture, you might as well move to commodity servers that are collectively cheaper and more powerful than two top-of-the-line servers. I wonder if there is an organizational equivalent of the CAP theorem.