For the engineers who have many years of experience working both remote and on site - how do you compare the pace of learning from your peers and forming meaningful bonds?
Bonding depends very much in the characters. One of my current coworker has a personality that reminds me of one of my best friend. I guess I could attribute the fact that we bonded faster to 4.5 WFH days compared to 2.5 at my previous company, but that would be disingenuous.
One benefit though is that I can invite my coworker/friend and his SO to spend a week at my place, in a coastal city and bond over catamaran outings rather than around a beer.
What I benefit from is going deep into the 'why' and 'how'. Sometimes it's just a clarification (I try to package them to avoid multiple interruptions), sometimes it require a two hour dive, starting dev Ec2s and plunge into a DB. I'm going on-site twice a month, so I know it's way easier to learn something w/o distractions. I tried to keep working on a complex task two months ago while in office, the loudness made me a X0.1 dev. It managed to get me really angry for the first time in months, without my gym or to work it out.
Nowadays I only take documentation/boilerplate or easy coding tasks that doesn't require to read code for 3-4 hours straight when going to the office. It's too inefficient otherwise. I think I prefer working while in the train tbh.