by tpmoney | 2025-11-29 18:11:24+00:00
> Remote work is way better than in-office work.

Remote work is different than in-office. And it's better for some people and worse for others. For example, while I personally find it useful to be able to type out an example when talking to someone about things, I also find that in order to get things done effectively at home, I have to ignore the notifications (or will ignore even if they're not explicitly ignored) when I'm "in the zone" as it were. The problem with this is that someone might have asked a question that I have the answer to, or even asked me a question directly, or someone else on my team may have been going down a rabbit hole that I could have stopped them from going down. But because using a chat system inherently requires context switching and your full attention, the only way to be in the loop is to be continually breaking out of where you are to go look at chat.

By comparison, in the office with my team around me, I can keep one ear open to the conversation that's happening in the air around me. My screen, my literally single focus within the computer and my fingers can all be occupied working on something, and I can use my additional sense of hearing to keep up with other things going on. When someone needs me specifically, they can (with varying degrees of forcefulness) grab my attention, where as online they have one and only one way, and it has the same priority as any other notification both in my conscious and unconscious mind unless I specifically read the notification (and again, context switch).

Video calls still to this day suffer from latency issues. We all, continually have the "What about - sorry - what if - sorry you go - do you want me to go?" conversation in video calls. That's objectively a worse experience than just having everyone in the same room. Even when people in the room start talking over each other, that can be resolved much faster in person than on the video call.

It's also really easy to get into the habit of not paying attention in conference calls/video calls. Because of the scheduling issues, remote work tends to include a lot more "just in case" invitations to meetings and discussions. Sometimes you really do need to be there, other times you don't. So you often get courtesy invites, and you might go, and while you're listening you might do that "identifying the ancillary information", or just keep trucking on whatever you were doing before the call started because you can just listen in. And slowly over time you and everyone else starts to build up the habit of not paying attention at all. It takes conscious effort and specific behaviors to not let yourself get distracted by the big distraction box sitting in front of you while you're having your meetings. There's a reason we generally consider it rude to be on your phone or computer in an in person meeting without specific need.

Perhaps more telling though is the fact that even remote work people acknowledge the importance of having dedicated working space. Even if you don't have other people in the space with you, almost everyone can agree that having dedicated space for working is important. But remote work puts the burden of paying for and subsidizing that space on each individual employee. For some of us, that's not a significant burden and for others, it's quite significant.

I'd also ask if 100% remote work was objectively better for all people and all things, I'd ask why co-working spaces exist? Why do remote workers congregate in coffee shops? Why, even though the internet and online communities are "remote first" groups, do we still have conferences, meet-ups and conventions? Why do we bother with these expensive and difficult to coordinate in person gatherings if everything we would do with them we could do better remotely?

In the end, remote work isn't one thing, it's many different things for each individual person and how you experience it is highly subject to your personal circumstances and your work environment as a whole. It should be entirely unsurprising that people are different and experience remote work differently and that as a result, plenty of people will genuinely prefer working in office to working remotely.