I worked from home 100% from Feb 2020 through October 2021 - so roughly 1.5 years.
For me
- work life balance suffered. I would often be found running back to my office to shoot out a quick email and then be found there working 1 hour later.
- Work life balance suffered. I would no longer enjoy after hours lab stuff/HAM/games/music/tinkering in my office at home because the office was also where i did paid work. So it became exhausting even going in there.
- office politics suffered. Which, running my infra/ops team, meant things got harder. It was harder for me to prevent shit from rolling downhill as some pushy rando would just directly bludgeon people on Teams etc.. People were generally more dickish and demanding (outside of my control in MANY cases).
- Office politics suffered - in person meetings and all staffs and such are times where little things can get communicated. Saying hi to this person or whatnot or just seeing them reminded you that you need to reach out later etc. All zoom meetings and the like suffer from this. And for some it becomes de-humanizing
- Work life balance suffered. Family expected me to immediately transition from work mode to home mode, i had little time for myself to decompress at the END of the day. I tried walking, including at the end of and begging of the day, but that was always seen as overrideable by many.
- Work life balance suffered. Many started working random hours and would ping me in those times. Setting boundaries helped a little but I got more after hours calls in that 1.5 years than I did int he 5 years prior, or the 1.5 since coming back.
- Work life balance suffered. Wife would expect chores and errands to be run while working. When at the office I spend those ebb times working on non-critical stuff, not laundry or market runs.
- Managing folks and project became harder. My rockstars did great, even excelled and many have opted to stay fully remote (and I still feel like this is a large swath of people here on HN, supremely motivated and enjoy their job etc). But my average folks had productivity tank. I ended up playing babysitter for some especially bad employees. Literally had folks not so secretly going fishing without taking the time off, only to be found out when fires started and they couldnt respond etc.
- Burnout increased across the team, including with some of my best. Partially because of the above.
Ultimately i returned to the office, and drug a few along with me. Its helped in almost all of the above. I still work a more hybrid setup, sometimes leaving at lunch and working the afternoons from home etc. But mostly its in office.
I am an IC, but other than that all of this was true for me during the 3 years I mainly worked remote. I definitely can echo what you said about people being dickish and bludgeoning people on remote calls - especially when we didn't enforce a camera policy. People said things that to that point in my career would have been absolutely shocking, and I never have heard anything remotely close in an office setting. I guess it's probably easier to be that way when working with people who are nothing but a name and a title to you, but I don't know.
Not OP but I have done both and right now do a mix of both and 100% agree. These interactions was something I missed a lot when working 100% from home.
