It is surprising how antisocial is the new generation. The dynamic between colleagues is something that comes naturally when the team has great cohesion. Half the time I didn't have to finish the sentence of what you describe and they are on it. I can't remember how many great ideas have come up during the "hey let's get a cup of coffee" break. Now we look less like humans and more like avatars.

It is surprising how social is the old generation. So many face to face interactions could have been taken care of by a 1 line email.

Like, a couple weeks ago I had to waste half my day to go into the office and sit in a 3 hour meeting. I got some useful information out of that, but there was SO. MUCH. OVERHEAD. I could've watched the webex from home and saved so much time because the relevant parts were 2 10 minute sections spaced out by like 2 hours.

Plus I hate sitting close to people who had onions for lunch. And alcohol. And it's always that dude you've gotta pair program with that smells like a gorilla and has bad breath. xD

All of those things are also possible in person. Of course I just send an instant message to my coworker across the hall. And I don’t clutter Slack when I want to make lunch plans.

I don't know what "all those things are possible" means aside from "all those things are possible as long as we zoom together while in the office". You can screen-share in the office - as long as you are both on zoom ( or equivalent ) at which point why is it better to be at the office?

It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us.

I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.

The places I’ve worked had lots of elegant and obvious solutions to shoulder surfing. Mirroring to a big TV was something we did all the time.

I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out.

If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too.

Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.

I don't know if it's just our org, but we do local + slack + conference sharing (ie, you have multiple ways of viewing the content). This, like for every meeting.

How do you manage when different people in the same area are in different meetings? That's where I see the problems occur - there'd be 4 people in my immediate vicinity having 4 completely separate conversations. That would never work.

That seems like a different problem - I'd assume you have a meeting room for each conversation. In your case we'd have headsets at desks - we do that too. The previous question was how meetings are handled (in a conf room). Regardless, chat+conf for everything even if it's in-person in the same room (audio off if local).