I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?

My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?

Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.

There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.

Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to

You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.

That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.

Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.

When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.