[turdprincess]

I think in-person collaboration helps, but with folks on the outside of your team. If you are on a small team or in a small startup, I don’t see a big impact of in person communication. You will be interacting with these same people so much that you will grow a close bond with them regardless. When I think about the small company projects I’ve done, it’s honestly hard to tell which were remote and which weren’t - the bonds formed and amount of teamwork was the same.

For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways.

There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.