[inowland]

A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate".

Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.

So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.