Most (tech) jobs involve huge amounts of co-ordination and creativity. This is waaaay easier in person, so having all the people needed in the same location makes a huge difference.
But the "same location" is almost an inverse square law. Same room - great. Really strong. Same floor. pretty good. Same building. Well that's starting to hurt. Different building, different town, different time zone. At the different time zone level the "gravitational interaction level" is something you need LIGO to pick up.
If you have a "team" of people answering first line support calls, spread them across the globe and get them to read off the same wiki.
If you just launched a 10M dollar project to fix "something vaguely defined that the board know is important but cannot agree on", welcome to hell. It's possible if you lock the best tech and rising business stars in the same room. Good luck otherwise.
Where do you get that coordination and creativity require in person time?
I would argue that most creative activities are better done alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods. And I coordinate just fine with tools available online.
I think you might be mistaking the kind of co-ordination that is possible with CI/CD tools to the co-ordination possible with shouting at each other in a room or having coffee or just being part of human interactions
If you are emailing people and co-ordinating that way you are already part of the political in-group.
If so then co-ordination is fine. But who is part of the political in-group, especially for constantly evolving projects and setups is a human activity and those are best done in person, walk bye, conversations that just happen.
Maybe your company culture does everything over email utterly in the open. Maybe the linux mailing list is the right way to do things.
I was not talking about CI/CD tools, but things like slack, tickets, wiki, shared calendars, etc.
I "shout" at my coworkers through slack and I feel like it achieves the same result as if we were in an open office. Better even since they can wait until they reach a stopping point in their current activity to answer me.
I do not believe in the magical "water cooler" conversation. I worked almost 10 years in an office before going full remote 6 years ago and I've never seen or heard this amazing conversation over coffee during which the next Gen product is discussed. Just my empirical experience, but lunch conversations are usually about batching about the clueless PM, or deciding where to get a drink after work, or stuff like that.
But the "same location" is almost an inverse square law. Same room - great. Really strong. Same floor. pretty good. Same building. Well that's starting to hurt. Different building, different town, different time zone. At the different time zone level the "gravitational interaction level" is something you need LIGO to pick up.
If you have a "team" of people answering first line support calls, spread them across the globe and get them to read off the same wiki.
If you just launched a 10M dollar project to fix "something vaguely defined that the board know is important but cannot agree on", welcome to hell. It's possible if you lock the best tech and rising business stars in the same room. Good luck otherwise.