I’m not a leader, but I know what leadership is because I’m surrounded by some spectacular leaders. They absolutely do not share your view.
When I’m running recruitment, I’m mostly interested in how well they‘ll work within the org, and my team. Someone who wants to shut themselves off 300 miles away and never actually meet their colleagues won’t survive in my org, because we foster and encourage collaboration. The natural networking and ”office culture” can’t be replicated on Slack / MS Teams, or any commercially available software that I’m aware of. Maybe the “metaverse” will afford opportunities in AR/VR spaces though.
Working for or with someone who is just a name in a Slack room sounds draconian. And hushed offices are literally the worst working environment for a million reasons.
As an engineering manager and senior leader, I've seen what's happening in the market - talent is being lost because businesses are requiring office time, and it's not once or twice a week which a lot of candidates can deal with.
Your experience seems to be limited to local teams - I've managed and am managing a distributed team, both within satellite offices and major hubs (i.e time zone differences). In this case, I've learned that developers still don't want to be disturbed and will happily reach out to others when they needs help, but from my 1:1s in skip meetings, they've all cherished that they feel
trusted. With local teams, an expectation that they are freely accessible is all that's needed. We are in a very dynamic and collaborative organisation - a failure in the product I own attracts regulatory eyes. The risks need to be balanced, but my teams have agreed that office time is not mandated, and the wider business is fine with that.
One thing that is important is office culture - and I'm not a fan of it. Recently, I was in office and became an unwilling participant to someone else's conversation, and at another instance, I had full insight into someone's interview. If employees followed office etiquette, things may be different.
I am lucky in that I travel 20 mins by public transport and I am in office, but have previously travelled 45 mins, of which 30-40 mins was on a packed train. That's not an experience I wish to continue and can sympathise with others.
I like many others don't miss the "office culture". It may be nice to meet up with colleagues once in a while to have lunch together, but the daily drudge of droning to and from work - which is effectively wasted time - doesn't benefit anyone.
The nature of today's work is that Slack is a thing. Even in office, when HipChat was around, most people communicated through HipChat. There were useful white boarding sessions, however, this proved to be limited to the resources available - not everywhere had a suitable whiteboard to collaborate on; and nowadays we have diagram tools which are adequate.
I started my career first as a software developer, and soon became a facilitator afterwards. I've worked with many teams and I will always say that each team is unique. Some teams need to see each other more often, others - not. It shouldn't be a blanket decision, but a team decision.
When COVID started, we started to have weekly team lunches and jamming sessions - a time where we'd come together to talk about something random that was either personal or professional. The ability to share this within an org has meant that my teams in two different locations know each other better - and they're not in the same office building.