I've worked jobs that pre-covid that were exactly what you describe, where 80% of the time we'd just ping one another without getting up. You never knew if you were ruining someone's concentration, so pinging over slack let them shift gears when it was best for them.

It's why I'm a large proponent of remote work - outside of lunch and meetings, my work experience compared to one of those (IMO bleak) environments is largely unchanged.

Working in an exciting and lively office is the ideal in my opinion, but it's hard to stumble into those - I feel like these days by definition the people who make an office a great place are the same people with the ability to control their experience i.e. choose remote work. The ones who make offices bleak are the same people who force others/ must be forced to go in to be productive haha

I've worked that way for 20 years. The product group I lead, e.g., from 2006 through 2014 was a total of 150 or so people, located in 4 up to 8 campus facilities on 3 different continents, and at least 40 or so individuals whose only office was at home. If you looked at all the individual "deliverable" teams in that group, I don't think there were any that didn't have key contributors who were not co-located. So they all functioned essentially as everyone remote, all the time.

(The downside to that arrangement for me, since I was responsible for the entire group, was that a work day spanned the entirety of the hours I was will to be awake. One soon learned to be brutal about blocking out non-work hours during your local usual business hours so you could accomodate the 5 and 6:00 AM calls that required people from Eastern and Western Europe, and the 8 and 9:00PM calls that got Asia, Singapore and Australia on board. We tried to keep individual teams from being constituted from more than 2 continents just to keep some sanity in people's lives).