One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion recently is that on every single engineering team I've worked on in-person pre-pandemic, synchronous interruptions were a significant frustration. Remember how we all used to bemoan open concept offices? Every team developed some version of a rule around not coming up and tapping people on the shoulder, like setting an expectation to reach out over chat first or a headphone rule not to interrupt someone if their headphones were on.

It's weird that this experience, which I know was very widespread in tech, is completely missing these days in discussions of remote vs in-office. People urging a return a to office are even explicitly bringing up the ability to come up and tap someone on the shoulder as a selling point of being in-office, ignoring the fact that most people have always hated this.

As far as sitting down and working together collaboratively, I have found in the past 2 years that video calls work perfectly well for this. We've made an explicit effort to reduce the number of recurring, scheduled meetings but also to encourage more ad-hoc, collaborative meetings to work on things together synchronously.

I think being an extrovert and missing the social aspect of working together in an office, is a perfectly legitimate reason to want to go back to an in-office job. In an ideal world I think every remote team should have an in-person off-site event for a couple of days every few months for purely social and team-building reasons. But I'm very skeptical about claims that you can't collaborate to get work done as well remotely because my own experience has been so different.