Recently I had a discussion with a guy who teaches agile/scrum and he trots out the old line that teams need to be co-located. He says the reason is because a lot of communication is non-verbal. I pointed out that these teams discussing technical matters and the non-verbal part of the communication isn't important. Also, with video conferencing you're not missing much anyway. I think Elon belongs to the old school on this, although it's not that old.
I've worked for teams co-located and distributed. In my experience distributed teams are a lot more efficient. No one's looking for a meeting room, one person at a time speaks. The meetings are normally a chore so people make them efficient.
As an employer, I would think you suddenly have access to a global labour force, you don't need to rent and manage office space and you have a much more flexible workforce.
Elon also thinks people should be putting in 60-70 hour weeks. You can only do this for a certain period of time until quality drops off, never mind the inhumanity of it.
It's a good move by JLR to take advantage of this. It really is the future, and a lot more of the value of cars is going to be in software in the future.
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