One of the reasons I'm a big proponent of WFH (at least for tech careers) is precisely because WFO involves such a staggering amount of wasted time for everyone

One of the reasons I'm a big proponent of WFH (at least for tech careers) is precisely because WFO involves such a staggering amount of wasted time for everyone, but it's so baked into the business culture that few people seem to notice the full extent of it. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree with the implication that WFO means collaboration/interaction and WFH doesn't. WFO makes the cost of interaction so low that it tends to get abused. YMMV, but I've been WFH almost entirely for the past decade and one of the key benefits is that gets things closer to the sweet spot in the right amount of interaction, and the collaboration is of higher quality. * WFH vs WFO has so many facets and tradeoffs, but for software companies at least, I'd be extremely skeptical that WFO produces better outcomes for the company on average. -- * I don't fully know all the reasons for this, but I suspect it's because remote interaction encourages proficiency in a richer set of collaboration tools, and so we learn to naturally flow from tool to tool based on what is the best fit - chat for spitballing, email for thoughtful protracted debate, a Google doc for hammering out proposals and requirements, etc. In nearly every case there's automatically a searchable history created. In WFO, it's typical to lean way too heavily on face-to-face, which is extremely costly in the moment, it doesn't encourage putting much thought/preparation into the communication, and it also lacks any sort of history keeping (unless done manually), so information is lost or, worse, the face-to-face collaboration is then followed up with using the same tools to attempt to recreate what was discussed/decided (so redundant effort).