[axitanull]

Surely the C-suites of the company will employ whatever brilliant ideas that we talk over the water cooler. The water cooler is the fountain of innovation after all.

Perhaps they should put all the water coolers in the executives' offices, so they can listen to all the brilliant conversations that take place at the water cooler.

[DannyBee]

To be fair, when i worked at IBM Research (Watson), there were collaboration areas at the end of each hall.

They got used quite often, and there are plenty of times where someone noticed another team or person working on something and discovered it applied to what they were doing and collaborated.

One example from an area i know well - if you look at static single assignment form for compilers, which is the basis of all optimizing compilers these days, two people came up with the static single assignment part, but had no idea how to create it fast , and ran into some others whiteboarding control dependence for other reasons, and realized that it solved their problem.

This is why the paper (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCyt...) has five authors and reads like one written by two different teams :)

I think the better argument is that it's not how newer generations seem to collaborate or operate, not that it never worked at all.

It definitely did work in the past.

[LunaSea]

Paid work holiday trips or conferences could simulate this missing social element for remote teams.

Ironically enough it would be by bringing them back together (but maybe in a more fun way than a regular office).