My (somewhat limited) experience working at semi-large tech companies (several thousand employees) was that my team and closely related teams were mostly located close together (same floor, often same area of the floor). I imagine certain roles need to collaborate across a broader number of teams and so maybe they derived less value from being in the office together, but it seemed like for most of engineering we were mostly well situated for in-office collaboration.
Do really large companies tend to forgo locating related teams closely together?
In my anecdotal experience, anything above 1000 employees and it just isn't possible to colocate anymore. You might be able to colocate certain specific teams, but if you work on a team that works across domains... good luck. You'll spend all of your time in video calls anyway!
The video conference room environment is so unpleasant (always craning my neck; crappy video quality; speakers with poor balance that frequently hurt my ears; awful reflections on TVs; the perennial "hoverer" outside the meeting doors for the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting) that I'd just rather work at home if even one or two hours a week are online via video.
I generally agree. In my experience, pre-pandemic companies did sometimes try to co-locate small engineering teams especially if, for historical reasons, they were mostly already clustered in one specific location. But companies also don't necessarily want to restrict their hiring to an hour radius of a given office, people want to move for various reasons, and some degree of collaboration with other groups is needed in any case. And, once you're distributed at all, you pretty much have to act like everyone is remote anyway.
Do really large companies tend to forgo locating related teams closely together?