[speakingcode]

in this day and age the notion that remote work hinders communication or scalability is absolutely absurd. Sure, it may hinder certain types of social interaction and communication, but in terms of collaborative engineering, it does not. Open source projects have managed tens, hundreds and even thousands of developers on single projects using rather primitive mailing lists, irc channels and source control. These days we have hangout and facetime, skype, hipchat... endless lists of intuitive textual, audible, and visual communication tools, project management tools, team management tools, code management tools... Using the right tools and practices, remote working is FAR MORE scalable than in-office working, because you can leverage a mass of employees from all over the world without the need to build out office space, infrastructure and other overhead to facilitate physical colocation.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...

[millstone]

Open source projects tend to be almost entirely remote. That’s qualitatively different from a company like Yahoo!, which I imagine to be majority in-office, with some remotes.

From the link you shared (which I strongly agree with):

There’s no halfsies in a distributed team. If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online... no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision

So the in-office members are forced into contortions to accommodate the remotes. That may be OK if the team is committed to the practice, like stack exchange is. But if Yahoo! is run like a traditional company, designed around in-office work with occasional exceptions made for remotes, then those remotes burden the in-office team members, and absolutely hinder communication.