I find it funny how people think that the natural state of humans is to be crammed in offices, or factories or mines in pursuit of wage labor, with manager overseers, and how this is now considered to be "for communication and collaboration", while this is a relatively recent invention.

Before the "closure of the commons" in England, wage labor world-wide was virtually non existent. It took a series of very harsh and restrictive laws and concerted effort of capital and lords over many generations to force the peasants and independent craftspeople, to leave their fields and workshops and join wage labor in the mines, and later, the factories. Offices were really invented much later, but are an artifact of that same type of thinking, and so are managers, a new type of "work" all about managing how others do the work. With that said, all through and through and up to today, body language has been an important thing of how people perceive information and how they communicate. That's not something I dispute. I dispute that we need to be at a place for 8-10 hours a day so we can read each other's (and our leader's) facial expressions, in order to do good work. If people can't have the time or ability to clearly express their views in a written format, and instead I have to stare at their faces to guess what they mean, I don't want to be working with those people.

Programming is deep and creative work. You need to sit and think deeply, in that way it's NOT comparable to factory work (which is the field where most "modern" managerial techniques come from). You don't do the exact same thing all over, repetitively, without a thought, despite how Agile, Scrum, or any kind of managerial trash is trying to convince you.

The manager of today's office very often is nothing but a glorified taskmaster:

- daily checking if you are on time with this and that

- giving you this or that small piece of work that later needs to be pieced together to make a finished product

The same way, in factories, craft was lost because people were doing only a their small part before finishing the product, many modern office environments push for and think of programming as "factory work", thereby destroying the craft, producing cheap items, that were often lacking in quality.

I like to think and do programming work as the result of the craft of many independent professional craftsmen, who will organize in groups when needed, and work deeply independently or in self-organized groups, rather than a factory floor with a taskmaster looking for clues into other people's faces whether their daily quota is finished or not. So let the craftspeople organize however they want, they can read each other's faces and debate the merits of this and that on Zoom, and they can find a fit for their product and go to meet in person if they desire to do so. You don't need a manager for that or to force people to go to a specific location so you can observe them.