Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.
When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
But only if you are working in close proximity to those working on the same projects and leadership going up at least two levels. (leadership, not management)
Why large companies with globally distributed teams see value in having employees in office sitting side by side in isolation is beyond me.
Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.
For who? Your employer keeps all the value and only employees pay the cost. Why would I want this as an employee?
And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...
Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.
I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.