Good/best practices are rarely followed, maybe 20% of practitioners actually follow them in any field.
So that means that on a daily basis, about 80% of people need to work in those "broken" environments.
Having people relocate to another country, because your organization isn't able to fix its own internal problems, means you're simply outsourcing your own costs to your employees.
And except for a select few, most people can't bend reality.
Reality being as it is, is no argument for not trying to be better or improve a situation:
Contrary to the Shaw quote above I’d say that simply resigning oneself to reality as it is and therefore precluding better approaches is the unreasonable choice.
There are all sorts of tools that allow for an asynchronous human connection, e.g., asynchronous video recordings.
Working mostly asynchronously also doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional synchronous online meeting (including coffee) as well.
Is there any proof that's truly the case? Or isn't that yet another one of those commonly accepted, yet rarely questioned truisms when it comes to - an often dysfunctional - work culture?
Not the OP but the proof is my own experience in both in-office and remote settings. And everyone is going to go by their own life experiences. If enough people think that remote setting sucks and that junior engineers, along with many other roles, are more effective in person, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that that's not the case.
Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case:
Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?
Or is it rather that the company in question itself has an underlying organizational problem?
Yes. My company is also in that category. We employ a lot of junior engineers too. >90% of them say they want some in-person interaction because it is hard to ramp up effectively on a complex codebase and a different culture.
> Therefore, someone claiming it doesn't work, is effectively saying it doesn't work for their company, which in turn gives rise to questions as to why that's the case
Because we are all humans and in absence of an in-person presence, we are not able to form trusting deep relationships.
> Is their company and its work truly that unique and special that it can only effectively be done synchronously and in person?
for example we are using gather.town. much better than Google Meet (full HD screen sharing, ad-hoc breakout sessions, blablabla, free under team size of 25, if I remember correctly)
I keep hearing such arguments but those typically aren't backed up by any data or reason as to why that's the case.
That said, poster child remote-first companies such as Basecamp, GitLab, or Zapier have their people gather a few times throughout the year, too, to allow them to get to know each other better. That's not a contradiction at all and something entirely different than mandating people move to specific location to work there the entire time.
I'd say burden of proof is on you to provide any data that remote work is equally good.
I have given remote-working a shot for three years - first ~1.5 were mandatory during COVID and last ~1.5 were during normal times. My company has gone all in on remote work and has tried to make it work. It just doesn't work and everyone is openly admitting its flaws. To name a few: a lack of trust, very shallow relationships, struggles for junior and new team members to ramp up, a lack of engagement etc.
Based on my personal experience and that of my social and professional circles, >80% people seem to prefer a hybrid model where they work 2-3 days in office and 2-3 days at home. Of course, in-office days have to be mandated for the entire team to be effective.