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Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

'In communication theory, the Allen curve is a graphical representation that reveals the exponential drop in frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases. It was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s.'

So this was well before mobile phones, Skype, chat, etc, etc. I wonder what the results would be for the same research done today.

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In the recent developments part it says:

"We do not keep separate sets of people, some of which we communicate in one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face-to-face, the more likely it is that we will telephone the person or communicate in some other medium."

My Slack communications with our Argentina team kind of follows this rule.

This podcast on distributed scrum, suggests some ways to "push the curve to the right".

http://www.se-radio.net/2011/12/episode-181-distributed-scru...

From my experience, the defining parameter is now the timezone difference (or, working hours kept), rather than distance.

There's a chapter in "Making Software" about "Conway's Corollary" that makes the claim that distance in the hierarchy matters more than physical distance.

Meaning that two engineers on the same hierarchical level but different parts of the world would more often communicate then a low level and a high level engineer in the same building ?

I think he means other engineers, in a different branch of the tree, whom are even more distant than someone is higher up but in the same branch.

How do you compare those distances? How many meters is a link in the hierarchy?

There's a section on that article called recent development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve#Recent_development

"For example, rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distances, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a near field rise)."

It's not the tech, it's the behavior.

Did the research control for the fact that people in the same department or woking on the same project tend to share space?

If I'm working on Project Banana I'm not usually going to have a need to talk to someone working on Project Avocado, even if we're on different corners of the same floor.

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