[hot_gril]

Because WFH didn't work for them.

My opinion as someone who's never been a megacorp exec: WFH should work, but they long ago set themselves up around some kind of over-collaboration with too many cooks in the kitchen, then with WFH they just introduced a big latency factor to it without fundamentally changing how they work (which would've been too risky).

[Gigachad]

I get this. Work requires every single PR to receive 2 reviews. It's not so bad in office because you just pull up a chair and have a discussion. But having to do it remote is infuriating and painfully slow. It takes hours at best, days on average to get a review, and then you make the changes and have to wait hours/days again for the next round. It's especially bad when a reviewer just isn't sure what something does so they leave a question and don't approve. Now you have to go through the whole process just to have them read and approve.

And this is just one scenario. There are so many things that seem to just grind to a halt when you can't just go talk to someone. You have to instead try to book a meeting which is so much friction that you avoid doing it if at all possible.

[hot_gril]

Code reviews are the basic thing that started taking longer, yeah. Also the system architectures tend to have multiple people owning one thing, vs a more distributed setup where one person has total authoritah over a service or two and just makes sure they talk well to the others.