It wasn’t until I was talking to my friend that I realized a small 30-persons company is just as clique-y as a small colonial-sized company.  When you’re working in a 1500-people company it’s impossible to know everyone and it’s inevitable that you’d only hang out and become good friends with your teammates.  But even in a smaller company where you know everyone by name, you pick and choose your friends, and be picked and chosen by.  Usually you hang out with the people you sit close to, but it only works out if your personalities, age and background are close enough.  It’s unfortunate if you don’t happen to sit close to people you could mesh well with because you’re destined to be a loner in the office.  There isn’t really any other opportunity to make friends unless you bump into people in the kitchen and start having an awesomely deep conversation with them… and even then you couldn’t really sustain it unless you continue the connection in some other way, such as asking them to lunch, which is difficult to do naturally if you don’t sit near one another.  So what I’ve gathered is, there will always be cliques, sometimes even with as few as 3 or 4 people, and the geographical location is one of the primary determinants even though it’s one of those that should matter least.