Speaking personally, I felt way too shut-in during my fully remote pandemic time. But I’m also quite glad that the work-week has relaxed such that I can work from home when I want to. Just a couple of thoughts on this part:
> being a ‘tech person’ who needs to focus on things in a deep way, and having to share some open plan office space with a hundred other people every day… The two things just don’t mix well.
I’ve totally argued this myself in the past. Long before the pandemic I even tried having office hours, and hanging ‘don’t talk to me right now’ signs on my char (with limited success at best). But for most software engineering I now disagree with the ‘I need deep focus’ arguments. I have watched way too many people go off and write the wrong software when left to their own devices, me included, claiming they needed space for deep thinking. Over-engineering is a widespread problem and a massive waste of time and energy, and a lot of people are better off with frequent check-ins and budgets on their alone time. Everyone hates having budgets and micromanagement too, of course, and it’s possible and common to go overboard on that in the wrong direction. It just needs to be balanced, but on the whole this is one of the reasons that being in the office sometimes is useful.
Another good reason is that co-workers need help, information needs to flow, and allowing knowledgeable people to avoid all interruptions is bad for the productivity of team. I have also seen many of the best engineers write large systems and get them deployed widely, with not enough documentation, and then make themselves unavailable and act like questions are too burdensome on their time, saying they require deep-focus time for whatever they’re working on.