Our company experimented for 4 months and found productivity is much higher and the only people who were unhappy were the managers. Our CEO jokingly said while the devs have become more productive after about 3 weeks he had no idea what managers were doing. Except managers everyone was laughing pretty hard. In my experience working in about 4 companies managers are the gatekeepers for not allowing WFH.

In my experience the short term is a great boost as it improves morale, but over the long term the lack of team spirit and the innovation factors go down.

But if you guys started in person, that means you all live close. Do you meet up once a week or so? That might be enough to bend the curve to successful.

Why does it matter if collaboration is rare if the work still gets done?

Google does allow some level of remote work. Apple does not, largely for security reasons.

Many law and accounting firms have embraced work-from-home policies despite their work involving significantly more collaboration than programming does.

Is the job of a company of 100 developers for 100 developers to grind out features in a silo? Or for them to collaborate and create something greater than any one can?

I am not saying WFH cannot work. I did a year solo when starting my startup. But I have been a part of a lot of full remote teams, and I did not want to run my team like that.

Most developers claim WFH is better and companies win if they do it. Cool. So the market should prove out that the companies that do WFH would win over the companies that require butt in office.

So far I do not see this result. For the same reason outsourcing doesn't work great for innovation, WFH is real real hard to innovate.

Totally prove me wrong though. Start your own company, work remote, and kill it. I love the idea. It's great for the environment. It's just not how I choose to run my company, nor do I see many other highly successful companies doing it. (Allow WFH once in a while, sure. But apply to Google and ask if you can work 100% remote).