[RestlessMind]

> You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year).

Doesn't ring true to me after spending 2 years in a remote-first setup. Even post-vcxx setup where everyone could meet freely didn't facilitate as much in-person interaction as I was looking forward to.

> Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable.

For junior engineers trying to onboard, sitting close to their mentors is big help. Same for senior TLs who are coordinating complex technical projects across a team of 10-12 engineers or even more. Having everyone around is a big time saver for the overall project. WFH/Remote setup is great only for the engineers who are self-sufficient and neither need mentoring from others nor have to coordinate and lead other engineers' work.