A lot of commentary here on HN about this as an "office vs remote" thing but my read is much more a "large organization" vs "small organization" thing.
"We want to ship and try as many things as possible" is often the only way to survive as a small new growing company in a competitive market. But it's rarely what companies maximize for when they're big and successful. The politics and theater comes from normal human interactions in a large group with a lot of intentional overlap/redundancy and not a lot of existential pressure. The org wants to be robust against any individuals leaving, they want to have teams ready to go in case they do need to move quickly in response to something, but most of the time they're just spinning wheels and keeping the money printers going. Remote work isn't going to prevent those dynamics, or the need to make sure you appear to be valuable through all that. If you fail at the "appearing valuable" game in an org like that, you're gonna be at the top of the list to cut when growth slows and the company hits the "reorgs and layoffs" part of the script.
The more intrinsically motivated, "let's directly do impactful things!", sort of person can easily end up bouncing themselves off the wrong incentives for years in an org like this.
"We want to ship and try as many things as possible" is often the only way to survive as a small new growing company in a competitive market. But it's rarely what companies maximize for when they're big and successful. The politics and theater comes from normal human interactions in a large group with a lot of intentional overlap/redundancy and not a lot of existential pressure. The org wants to be robust against any individuals leaving, they want to have teams ready to go in case they do need to move quickly in response to something, but most of the time they're just spinning wheels and keeping the money printers going. Remote work isn't going to prevent those dynamics, or the need to make sure you appear to be valuable through all that. If you fail at the "appearing valuable" game in an org like that, you're gonna be at the top of the list to cut when growth slows and the company hits the "reorgs and layoffs" part of the script.
The more intrinsically motivated, "let's directly do impactful things!", sort of person can easily end up bouncing themselves off the wrong incentives for years in an org like this.