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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

"A study conducted on the main campus of a Fortune 500 company found that just 10 percent of all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than 500 meters apart. This suggests that once companies span multiple floors, buildings, or campuses, they’ve already lost much of the collaborative value of being “in the office” together."

This point often seems to get missed. If you're at a large company, you're often working with people on different floors, buildings, offices, countries. I want to be co-located with the people I work with often just isn't an option at larger companies even if many people come into an office.

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This cuts both ways though. Working from home my "circle of communication" has gotten much smaller than it ever was before, because I don't run in to people.

I'm sympathetic to that. Certainly much earlier in my career, I had a lot of day-to-day personal contact with most of the people I worked with. Of course it was a different time with much different communication methods available--basically desk phone and early internal company email--and expectations for in-person meetings and hallway conversations.

But today even if I were in my local office, almost no one I work with would be in that office even if they weren't WFH anyway.

I'd argue if a company depends too much on "spontaneous hallway conversations" for information flow/exchange, that should be treated as a problem to correct. Most places I've worked that relied heavily on word-of-mouth had similar problems:

- Terrible written documentation

- Major and minor decisions not reaching everyone affected, resulting in a lot of people not knowing what's going on

- Perception of decisions getting made in secret or without transparency

- Other non-verbal communication channels get neglected, e.g. the only way to get in touch with Director ABC is to physically accost him in the hall

- Remote workers are frequently forgotten or treated as second class citizens

- Favorable treatment for in-groups and cliques, based on extroversion rather than job performance

These all seem like objectively bad problems for a business, and I'd argue many of them stem directly from overreliance on face-to-face.

> I'd argue if a company depends too much on "spontaneous hallway conversations" for information flow/exchange, that should be treated as a problem to correct

I don't think this is a black-and-white issue. Sometimes a "spontaneous hallway conversation" clarifies in 5 min what a 30 min Zoom call would otherwise do.

3 of my coworkers and I coordinated a few months back to go in on a single day together. I was reading over a doc a coworker wrote and had a question about a portion and found him grabbing coffee and coming back to his desk. I just went over and asked him the question, he clarified, then we both sat back at our desks and got back to work; I was unblocked. If we were remote, I'd DM him and then stop reviewing the doc until I got an answer. I often context switch out of work I need clarification on since I have no guarantee that the coworker is even ready to help. Having state (in a meeting, not at your desk, at your desk, chatting with a coworker, etc) on coworker availability is very useful for efficiently working.

> Perception of decisions getting made in secret or without transparency

I'd argue that this is worse remote. When remote, a lead and a manager get into a VC call and hash out the team roadmap without any input from the team. They can reason it's a lot easier on availability and less disruptive on the rest of the team to make the decision. While the lead and manager offer the plan to the team for comment, the team feels demotivated because they have to read and push back rather than sit at the table for comment. In office, the lead and manager can discuss things at desks and interested employees can overhear and interject. It's not perfect of course (favors those around for the conversation), but it's better than the Zoom world.

I think hybrid remote-first work is the best of both options but I think most companies going fully remote will not go hybrid because the cost savings of doing everything online is just so much higher. As you noted, offline-first companies will treat remote workers and second-class citizens.

Isn’t an alternative explanation that companies locate people that need to communicate near each other? Why would we assume you are equally likely to want to communicate with every other employee.

That assumption was not made by GP. A sufficiently large company will encounter this problem no matter how well they try to solve the NP-hard problem of efficiently allocating workspaces.

No. Many companies group by discipline. A self sufficient actor rarely needs to talk with someone else just for sharing the same discipline. On the other hand, having no one to relate to can also be a problem, and enough people are not consistently self sufficient to make grouping trivial.

Then you couple that with the fact companies love one-size-fits-all solutions.

This 100%. We reliably shuffled people to keep them with their teams on a constant basis.

This hits home for me for a completely different reason. I'm currently hybrid and notice some issues do get fixed faster in the office following that same 90% rule

In the office people don't mind tapping their neighbor on the shoulder 10 times a day to ask how to find/do something. On Slack they feel self conscious about zooming/slacking with someone 10 times in 1 day with questions. It's more about being in your head and feeling like a nuisance online vs. in office, than office being better than remote

This also makes our office days pretty dead in terms of actual progress on projects. Our stronger engineers work much more efficiently at home

> Our stronger engineers work much more efficiently at home

That depends on how you measure efficiency. On many teams, the strongest engineers maximize their impact by helping other people.

My (somewhat limited) experience working at semi-large tech companies (several thousand employees) was that my team and closely related teams were mostly located close together (same floor, often same area of the floor). I imagine certain roles need to collaborate across a broader number of teams and so maybe they derived less value from being in the office together, but it seemed like for most of engineering we were mostly well situated for in-office collaboration.

Do really large companies tend to forgo locating related teams closely together?

In my anecdotal experience, anything above 1000 employees and it just isn't possible to colocate anymore. You might be able to colocate certain specific teams, but if you work on a team that works across domains... good luck. You'll spend all of your time in video calls anyway!

The video conference room environment is so unpleasant (always craning my neck; crappy video quality; speakers with poor balance that frequently hurt my ears; awful reflections on TVs; the perennial "hoverer" outside the meeting doors for the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting) that I'd just rather work at home if even one or two hours a week are online via video.

I generally agree. In my experience, pre-pandemic companies did sometimes try to co-locate small engineering teams especially if, for historical reasons, they were mostly already clustered in one specific location. But companies also don't necessarily want to restrict their hiring to an hour radius of a given office, people want to move for various reasons, and some degree of collaboration with other groups is needed in any case. And, once you're distributed at all, you pretty much have to act like everyone is remote anyway.

Do you think that point is often missed? I would have said the opposite: that it's pretty obvious that most of the advantages of working in person would apply only to fairly small teams that can collaborate synchronously.

>Do you think that point is often missed?

Yes I do. A lot of people seem to think that if everyone went into an office, they'd all be working with a co-located team sitting a stone's throw from each other. This may be true with startups. It's often not the case (with local small team exceptions) for larger companies--especially those which already had practices of being fairly flexible about location for a lot of hires.

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