"To build world class software, we need everyone to be inside this building."
Developer: *Installs 9 trillion packages written outside this building"
— Mark Dalgleish (@markdalgleish) April 7, 2019
The infrastructure version of this is: “To build great infrastructure, we need everyone to be inside this building!”
Me: The primary data center is a thousand miles away and the failover data center is 2,000 miles away. My nearest team member is in the UK. Literally not a single person in this building knows a single thing about what I do or when I do it.
Of course, butts in seats is a managerial obsession — MBAs love seeing their charges arrayed out on a floor, actual productivity be damned.