It's funny to bring up hospital and grocery stores when the subthread is about RTO and collaboration in person. Those would probably be the last places to go fully remote.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying because you think tech jobs aren't important then collaboration in tech jobs isn't important as well?

End of the day, you can always quit and do another job. Part of the role of senior+ engineers in tech is to be a force multiplier and work across silos. If you don't want to do that, there's still remote jobs out there where if you're a good enough pure coder you can get paid. Sure you won't have the same career progression but it's different priorities right?

Yes, there's a balance. Best focused, individual work is probably done alone, in quiet.

But with collaboration, sometimes weeks of work can be cut out if one discovers the right work to do. And even better if a new direction or idea can be found. This is all of course technically possible remotely, but it doesn't happen in the general case because we didn't evolve to work by ourselves without f2f contact.

As I said in another comment, part of the job as an experienced/senior engineer in tech is to work with others, and not be a hero programmer.

I actually think that there's room here for a hybrid. Have one track for remote engineers and one for in person. Remote engineers get different work, they generally have a lower ceiling in career potential. In exchange they get what they want, they work mostly by themselves with videoconf/slack as aid.

Of course there's always the exceptions. If you're the top 0.0001% in domain experts in a field, you can do whatever you want.

> employees would rather work and live away from the grind-zero

Citation needed. Most of the people I talk to prefer a hybrid setup - 2/3 days from home, 2/3 days in office. For office days, an obvious caveat is that the entire team has to be present on those days to realize the benefits.

> If businesses want to attract talent, they need to accept this.

Looking around here in SV, plenty of businesses seem to be attracting great talent even with RTO policies.

Sure, for some jobs there's probably not much benefit to collaboration. I'm mostly talking from the perspective of FAANG type companies, where there's very high potential impacts from small groups of focused people. If you're not working at that scale, the stakes are lower and it may not matter as much.