Cannot agree more. Human interaction in person is far superior to virtual. Younger developers have never experienced this so they don’t appreciate the lack of it. However, I notice their delayed and glacial pace of growth. All of this is due to lack of discrete interaction which is where the real learning, team development and software development processes can thrive.
Never a full-time developer but I had a ton of in-person interacting in the early years of my career--even though I've had significant remote (admittedly mixed in with a good bit of traveling for a long time). Maybe it's a lack of imagination but I can't imagine how working more or less full-time out of my apartment for my early career years would have worked.
Yes, you can see the development plateaus earlier in recent decades. Teams that I've managed that are collocated are more nimble and ramp faster because in-person feedback loops all day long. I'm doing a bad job communicating this, and it is disappointing to see so much "well, i'm special and can learn on my own" which is something I've encountered so many times over the years (hint, it is a very small %age). The self-sabotaging isolation is astonishing. But as I said before, forcing people to commute far distances in cities with gawd-awful public transport is both on the OEM and on the car-centric USA. But I digress... All I know is: teams that are in the same building are 2-3x more effective than teams that are fragmented across the globe.
