This has taken such a long time to play out. It's been obvious to me since it became possible to physically move my computer out the office and take it home (c.

This has taken such a long time to play out. It's been obvious to me since it became possible to physically move my computer out the office and take it home (c. 1990) that software development doesn't need to be done in a central building. Then when I worked in Silicon Valley in the late 90s, I did go into an office, but realized that 80% of the colleagues I interacted with were not in that office. They were either elsewhere on campus in other buildings, or in other countries. This, of course, facilitated by the internet that we were building at the time. So I moved to a location where I wanted to live, a long way from the office building. My employers' would ask that I travel to be "on site" from time to time. Fair enough, but after a few years of this I noticed that I was traveling to an empty office to have meetings where all the other participants were on the Polycom. So subsequently I only worked for clients who were mostly/fully remote. Next a pandemic, where everyone else adopts my work model. Everything's fine -- nobody is commuting and they can continue to do productive work while attending useless meetings remotely. Collaboration (aka "pair programming") is much easier thanks to remote screen sharing. Business relationships widen because nobody cares where anyone is located any more. Heck, supposedly the personal computer was invented in a garage (not an expensive office).