I dislike RTO for one simple reason . I'm not at work to make friends, I'm not at work to chit chat. I'm not at work so we can talk about who won the last football game . I go to work in exchange for currency, which is required to acquire goods and services. All this other crap, all these holiday parties, all of this let's dance in diversity videos, no that's not what I'm here for . Most of the time coming to the off…
I solved an incredibly difficult technical problem while grabbing lunch during PAX with fellow co-workers.
Spending time face-to-face with team members as a lead help me keep track of who needed some extra time off, who was at risk of burn out, and who was being harassed out of band by PMs.
One of the most powerful things my team did was have cookies out in front of her desks everyday. Other devs would stop by the chit chat and it let us keep a pulse on how the entire war was doing. My team was able to get a lot more done and hope everyone succeed because we had not just technical connections but personal connections throughout the building.
Those personal connections also let me transfer top performers onto my team, people who would otherwise have left the org due to dissatisfaction with their current team.
Knowing individual developers one-on-one also helps me know what problems they're going to have with their code and blind spots in their technical knowledge.
Finally, there's a fact that trust is earned through time spent together. As a junior member of a team, I was able to propose some radical alternative solutions to problems because of how much time I'd spent talking to the tech leads above me.
That said, the working conditions in most offices are so bad, I see what people want to stay home myself included.
Even Microsoft, who years ago commissioned studies showing the massive productivity gains from individual offices, has gone against their own best practices and resorted to loud open office nightmare environments.
I think part of this is because corporations no longer expect individual engineers to come up with radical solutions to hard problems and are okay with mediocre solutions to everyday problems instead.
In my opinion, this results in massive numbers of employees being hired to create complex solutions. When one quarter of the employees could have got the job done if they were treated well.
Another aspect of everything going wrong is that American cities are so poorly designed with constrained housing that commute times have gotten way out of hand. Even in the early to mid 2000s when I started my career it was possible for people to live 15 minutes from work or buy a house 20 minutes away. I used to have a round-trip commute time of under 10 minutes so of course I didn't mind coming into the office.