[jcr]

The more interesting thing about this story is how all of the examples are tied together in an already well known way stated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, "The Mythical Man-Month". You may have heard the adage of how adding developers to a late project only makes the project more late. The reason is communication overhead. One developer can produce some number of lines of code in a given day, so you'd expect adding more developers would result in more lines of code being written -- essentially O(N). Unfortunately, there is communication overhead and it increases complexity at O(N^2) as well as being an even bigger drain at the start when bring new developers up to speed with the existing group. If you take a step back, all of the remote working patterns presented in the article as working are essentially ways to eliminate the need for communication.