[yason]

> My personal problem with most of this conversation is that > in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 > countries) it is really the truth that you are left > behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails > and chat.

That is not a team: that is a department.

You cannot meaningfully follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time, and you cannot deeply interact with maybe at most ten people at time. You also cannot follow more than a handful of subjects with reasonable comprehension: assumedly you work on one or two things full time and that knowledge fills most of your brain anyway. The 500 other people are those from whom you hear summaries from company or department wide meetings once a month or so.

The communication overhead grows exponentially with the number of people. That's why departments form teams of maybe a dozen people and let the managers communicate and filter information back to the team so that the team members can focus on doing what they know best instead of trying to track everything that is happening. You can always talk with specific people when you need to know more about something specific: you don't have to know everything by default.