I've been WFH-ing for a long time now and am usually the person being approached for advice and mentoring. I never found the efficiency of the process to be lacking or as you describe "order of magnitude" worse remotely vs F2F.

As I'm always open to learning new things and changing my opinion, could you please elaborate on how the direct contact makes mentoring so much better?

Just my experience, but people are more inclined to ask questions in person. Beyond this, you get cues from body language as well as facial expression.

For me personally, I can see a white board better at 15-20' than I can see a monitor 30" away.

There are ways to digitally cope... But it's just that. It's far less natural if an interaction. I can understand the anxiety and autistic resistance to it. But that's relatively easy to with through.

> For me personally, I can see a white board better at 15-20' than I can see a monitor 30" away.

How literal is this? That sounds like you need glasses or to fix the light balance in the room with the screen.

I'm naturally far sighted, with some retina damage to boot. Glasses help a bit, but not a lot, and with the retina damage it's inconsistent throughout the day.

Fortunately, most of the apps I use can adjust zoom (mostly vs code, browser, visio, etc).

> and am usually the person being approached for advice and mentoring. I never found the efficiency of the process to be lacking

That's a good exmple for GP's point: deliberate, premeditated interaction works just fine remotely. But everything else falls away. That talk amongst the almost random subset of meeting A that happens to be also in meeting B and walks from A to B together, things like that. Occasional random peerings are powerful and a company chatroulette would be an awkward substitute.

I've had the opposite experience

It really depends on office culture. Every time we're all in the office at the same time, we end up going to the nearest bar. WFH is just more productive cause of that.

> I wish this wasn't the case.

This is my diagnosis of all of these WFH discussions. People like the benefits of remote work so much that they are (subconsciously) trying to deny any possible problems and the "back to the office" trend can only have nefarious motivation.

If you trade commute time for work, WFH is hard to beat for work, because you have so much more time to make up for less efficient communication. If you trade commute time for not work, WFO is hard to beat.