alt Hacker NewsReminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..."
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.