That example, if you never came in the only thing an observing boss would likely know of is that you failed to do a task. It's also super easy for that FPGA engineer to not tell others he made the mistake.

I notice a general problem of wfh is people have zero connection to each other. It's easy for everyone to get "corporate" with one another because they have literally no care or connection to each other. It's really hard to let your coworker look bad if you hang out and chat every day. Not a lot of people I know are willing to toss a friend under the bus but wfh makes it less likely to have a real relationship.

Old friends and long time coworkers that are good at their job have basically no problems wfh.

In this case until I started asking hard questions about how do I see what my code is doing (remember I was new and he was experienced - the correct assumption is my code was bad) he wouldn't have known there was a bug. Nothing was working, but only because software wasn't setting the correct values. Only after we dug in did we realize that the verification was destructive, so my checking that the settings were correct (which passed) reset the settings, and it didn't work in test. Or something like that - this was nearly 30 years ago, if you think I (or anyone) remembers details perfectly that long you have bigger problems than my memory.