The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.
I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps.
Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.
