I work in a federal government position, and remote work is super problematic for getting stuff done.

My background is I have a short commute, my home is small (with 3 kids with my wife who stays home with them), and my office space is great (I have my own personal office but also freedom to work anywhere on the campus via laptop). My work is about half physical and half computer normally, but mostly has been computer lately.

The workforce has a median age past 50. They (especially senior staff) do not use the collaboration tools. When I write a document for review, some of the reviewers will literally print it off to make markup on it, then email the scanned document. They’re not responsive to the online chat, they are available only occasionally when in the office. People are usually working multiple projects at a time, critical review work is not given an explicit time budget (supposed to be “white space”) and often whether they decide to get to your issue depends on how they’re feeling at the moment. This increases the latency of the review/fix cycle to one or two days at least.

Recently, I had a rush job on a paper, & my strategy to finish it quickly was to camp outside the reviewer’s office and catch them as they were coming in or out. Issues that were taking about 2 days to fix before got addressed in a short 5 minute conversation.

On another couple projects involving physical work, we had some team members who insisted on not coming in to run their code on physical equipment, and they insisted that the other people on-site do it, in spite of those people having other work to do. The on-site people were therefore forced to carry a much greater workload than those who were remote as they had to be the hands and eyes of those remote. Not only that, but because of this disconnect, the level of abstraction the remote people were working on was much higher than the physical hardware required… they were building mathematical models and hadn’t ever tried seeing how the code worked on physical avionics; they had no knowledge of the avionics software compiling tool chain as they never used it & expected that work to be handled by other researchers (who had their own time constraints). So the project basically didn’t succeed because of this.

At some point, the physical world has to come into play.

Management is also a harder problem. I know this is cast as a power struggle, but you have to actually solve the management problem. If remote work doesn’t affect isolated worker productivity but does make management less effective, that clearly makes the organization as a whole less effective.

I am a big fan of remote work and with proper collaboration tools, this can be just as effective. But lack of real-time communication makes this fail. Lack of physical context for software implementation can make this fail. Lack of camaraderie between workers who never see each other can make this fail.

If the alternative is 90 minute commutes, it seems clear remote is probably better most of the time, but inability to actually talk to people in person ever is a potentially huge barrier in some instances.

I’m not a manager. I have no commercial real estate interests. I have a compact home with no home office and three children, two of which spend most of the day at home. Focused work is nearly impossible during the day, so most of my remote work is done at night. I cherish the ability to go into the office for focused work and for low-latency communication with fellow workers and management as well as ability to do physical technological and experimental work where the software meets the hardware. The quality of much of the discussion of this is terrible on HN.