I fully agree that conversations are necessary to advancing a career, technical or otherwise. But I believe these technical conversations translate online pretty well, and have pre-pandemic too (eg successful FOSS that's all coordinated remotely, like Linux). That's not the case for the more management-centric decisions. If you're discussing other people (both in an HR sense and in a process design sense) body language and other non-verbal cues are much more important.

I've found these technical discussions, pair-programming, mentoring, architectural consensus building, are all much easier to do "remotely" than typical management-style discussions. Our project's technical team size fits into the "two pizza" rule, although just barely probably, so it's not like we're super tiny.

Pair-programming is great online. Better than in-person in my experience. Simply share your screen, and I can put it up on my second monitor. We've successfully mentored numerous junior-ish devs during COVID, with heavy use of remote pair-programming.

Architecture type discussions main drawback is missing a whiteboard, but there are a plethora of online tools of varying quality. In practice we often use draw.io and show a bit more finished copies than pure whiteboarding, but we've used other more simpler solutions for whiteboarding here too.

Design discussions/architectural consensus take place fine online, we just haven't had any issues. Just like pair-programming or architecture, we might screenshare but mostly we talk. And we find we don't lose anything from this. Sure, you don't get body-language, but that isn't needed for discussing bearer tokens.

In summary, while I agree that technical discussion is necessary at all stages, I believe that technical discussions is far less negatively impacted by remote when compared to non-technical discussions (i.e. managerial).

>All of this is easier face to face.

Yet somehow the world of open source keeps putting out high quality software with teams distributed across the planet in different time zones with different native tongues.

I agree with you about juniors, new hires, and maybe about advancing your career, but I would argue many technical discussions are just as good if not better in a virtual environment. Sharing screenshots, code snippets, or just being able to reference information during the discussion makes it all easier.

For me, my boss has told us he wants 2 people on site every day per week, doesn’t care who. In the event a new server or other hardware is shipped to the building he wants a safe two-man lift to be possible. I think it’s fair, and he doesn’t care who goes in, so it ends up being the people that like being in the office the most that show up.

IMO zoom is plenty good for that. What are you missing that you aren't getting from zooming with someone face to face at this point? I just don't get it. It's way easier to just schedule a zoom meeting and fire off an email with a link and share a screen, than it is for me to haul myself all the way to where someone else is sitting and take turns poking fingers at eachothers laptop screens in an awkward huddle, hoping we don't disturb others.

if you use something better than Teams then group calls and screen sharing are quite simple and effective.