Feeling Co-location
I'm working on a very small team at the moment and everyone I need to talk to is, at most, several cubicles away (don't get me started on how much cubicles suck, by the way). Today I started working on something completely new to me. Luckily, one of my nearby co-workers is intimately familiar with it and he sits 8 steps away. When I got started I asked him everything I thought I would need and went back to my desk. Several minutes later expectations weren't meeting reality and I had more questions. He answered those and asked some of his own about something on which he's working. About twenty minutes later he had another question about something in Windows and I had another question about my stuff.
I've worked on teams with members in different cities that were 1) in the same time zone, 2) in time zones a couple of hours earlier / later, and 3) with people half a world away. While number 3 sucked the most (over a 12 hour turnaround time on email, no hope of phone conversations) the inability to fire off a quick question or two without picking up the phone, the complete lack of feedback from facial expressions and body language, and the lack of being able to overhear a conversation related to what you're doing have all been irritating and wasteful.
I think a lot of higher ups are too concerned at using the resources they already have in different cities or of saving tons of money by offshoring a part of the project. From down here at ground level I would say that it is a mistake. The best and most efficient working situations I've been in involved everyone being less than 30 seconds of walking distance away from each other. Less time is wasted on trying to exhaustively and preemptively document / explain everything. You don't have to wait for return phone calls. It's harder to blow people off or hand off crappy work when you have to see them in the halls (not that I would ever do such things).
Although there are solutions to alleviate problems when it is just impossible to have a co-located team (video conferencing, teleconferencing, instant messaging, VNC / remote desktop, etc) I think most of the people that have to do the actual work would agree there is no real substitute. As such, I think I need to work this into my employer interview questions.
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