I've got about three meetings in me on an average day before my batteries are exhausted and I am effectively done for the day.
When agile-ish processes use up on of those lives every day, that leaves very little slack before recurring customer statusing, actual troubleshooting, or an honest-to-god productive planning meeting wipes the counter out.
I suspect you could waste a lot less time if meetings required agendas distributed beforehand and minutes distributed afterwards, but absolutely no one does that, or would read such material if it was produced.
The people I know who call themselves effective altruists seem to have gone beyond any actual philanthropy at this point and just go on tirades about AI risk and the singularity.
We seem to be very worked up over a virtually unknown new C-replacement language that's more likely than not to fizzle and become yet another 0.1% also-ran.
Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.
At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
Working remotely is better than all of those things, iff you commit to doing things correctly and writing things down.
Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.
I very much think that the "give me money" model is a really good one.
There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs through a lot of corporate office management, like they are trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own children.
I really dislike this when it feels forced and artificial.
Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out, or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate and then expects you to be grateful about it.
All I can say is thank god most of the stuff I work against has the source published on Github, and most of the rest is in decompiler-friendly languages.
This leaves the completely inscrutable and mostly undocumented REST apis that I've got to trial-and-error at, and always ask whether I did something wrong, the other party made a breaking change, or its just a Tuesday and the infrastructure is derped up.
It's not clear that writing tooling in Javascript has been a win.
I do hope that we can get back to that "JS as compilation target" model eventually with WebAssembly. Even with improvements like TypeScript slathered on top, it's not fun writing Javascript, the tooling sucks, and it's vastly less productive than better developer ecosystems.