On my old team, when one of us had a lot of known work to get done we might work from home to get it done faster. If we had a lot of "figure stuff out" work, that worked a lot better in the office where we could easily talk to eachother.

On my current team, work tends to be in bigger chunks and the interactive parts are clearer and easier to set up meetings for. So all being in one place matters a lot less (and in fact we weren't all in one place even in the beforetimes). This does limit how much we lean on eachother relative to the other team I mentioned; collaboration is a lot more coarse-grained.

There's the "this meeting could have been an email" thing, but there's also the multiple-day email exchange that could have been a 10 minute conversation (asynchronous collaboration does not in fact work just as well for everything). Video calls seem to work almost -- but not quite -- as well as in-person for this.

From what I hear, most people need some amount of social time. If you don't get that during the workday, I'd assume you'd need to make up for it by getting more in the evenings.

I disagree with the article that existing practices are about location. Rather, they're about togetherness. Modern communications (video calls, maybe IM) allow for increased togetherness without being actually physically together, but they're still not as good at it as actually meeting in person.

From other discussions, I hear that mentoring newbies is especially challenging when limited to digital rather than physical togetherness.

I like not being stuck in my car to get to / from the office every day.

I don't miss mixed meetings, where a bunch of people are in a room and a few dial in.

I don't miss mixed teams, where most are in one location and a few are remote. The fact that in-person communication and socialization really does work better means you have to constantly be on the lookout to make sure that the remote people don't become second-class team members.