If my job involved integrating 11 subsystems I’d need some pretty intense focus!

We can tell this isn't Reddit because you don't have a top reply to your post stating, "this is what happens when we let the neurotypical into the tech industry."

Did you mean "commoditized", like work that used to be hard and custom is now generic? If so, totally agreed... we've moved up the ladder of abstractions quite a bit and there's less of a need to build up from the ground these days.

To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).

Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.

The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.