I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone I work with. But, I hate the physical space.
Turns out, it was just advertising that made the cash all along. The silly "collaborative" environment had nothing to do with it.
The peons all had desktop computers, while middle management had clunky laptops with docking stations. You knew who the executives were by their small laptops that were clearly designed for traveling by the jet setting class.
I’ve come to think that the ultimate power move for the movers and shakers at a company, would be to have a traditional office with a desktop computer that they cannot take with them. I remember being excited the first time I was issued a corporate laptop. I felt like I had finally arrived, and finally was one of the powerful and privileged. Now, I look back on those days of desktop computing, where I could not take my computer home, and where there was no expectation that I would randomly work from home as the very height of luxury.
I had them from 2001-2014, 2017-2018.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.
Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.
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.
But "collaboration"....
I personally don't mind sharing office space with less than about four coworkers. In a small(!), shared office there is enough social pressure to keep concentration periods quiet, or agree on shared music choices, &c. and still maintain the advantages of having what amounts to a team meeting space for collaboration in the same footprint.