I have been working for 35 years now (is that blast of cold air just the feeling of getting old?), and have been mostly remote since Covid. I did go back during the RTO wave, but only for about a year. Some family medical issues forced me to ask to work remotely, which the company somehow approved.

It has been a mixed bag. Some random thoughts.

On good days, I get an enormous amount done. Long stretches of uninterrupted, focused work. On other days, I drift aimlessly.

I have always been somewhat disorganized (ADHD or whatever), but the office provided some structure. You had to show up, sit at your desk, and at least make a reasonable attempt at working. Remote work removes the external discipline.

It is not that I don't get things done. When something needs to happen, I can still pull myself together. Just last week I worked until 2 AM to meet some deliverables. But the chaos between those bouts of productivity has grown.

I always had a habit of using a Tuesday evening to speed-run whatever I had been putting off and occasionally sacrificing a weekend to catch up. But with remote work, the boundaries between work and leisure have become very fuzzy.

Maybe it was just the last 2 months of election season that were bad. I tried to fix it before but could not, but the last week since the elections got over has been magical :)

I miss the casual interactions that come from being around other people. But I think at least half that nostalgia is for an office that doesn't really exist. My actual work is with teams scattered across the world. Most of the people I would meet in the office are colleagues who report to my manager, rather than the people I collaborate with every day. But the ability to go out for lunch or coffee together, or meet at least the local people I work with, did count for something.

I can not really go back at this point in time due to continued family needs, but I wish I could.

I know this is not ask/tell HN, but a story about an article, so apologies for the digression.

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rented_mule 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My career was a similar length, but I'm retired now. ~2/3 of my career was remote. My personality made remote (or a private office, which was rare) significantly more productive. When others can observe me at my desk, I'm highly self-conscious and that distracts me. Catching glimpses of others' faces while I'm looking around in thought also rips me out of the flow. But when I know I'm alone, focus is a lot easier for me. Home is even better than a private office because when I'm not feeling it, I can go start a load of laundry or take out the trash, then come back and see if I'm feeling it. When I am feeling it, I can go longer because some of the chores are now out of the way. That was all as an engineer.

For the last ~1/3 of my career I was a manager, and most of that time was in the office. Being remote as a manager was a lot harder for me. I found it so much easier to understand where someone's head was at when we could sit in a room or take a walk together. If I saw them fidgeting more than usual in a one-on-one, I could try to figure out if there was something they were having trouble bringing up, or if they just weren't feeling like spending time together that day. If I saw a different look on their face than usual when they were at their desks, I could use that as a trigger to check-in and see if there was anything I could help with. It was a lot harder when those little clues were missing, especially during a difficult time like the pandemic. I eventually learned to replace some of that with DMs ("Hi there, it's been a few days since we've chatted, so I wanted to check-in to see how you're doing. Anything I can do for you?"), but it was more like me polling than me getting notifications, so it felt more intrusive and less efficient.

That's all just me. I think the differences vary a lot by person, by role, and even by team/company. There were certainly periods where being able to grab lunch and/or a whiteboard was extremely valuable (and fun!).

	▲	phil21 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Similarly my career started off 'full remote' as it was a small company that began in the late 90's almost by accident, picking up employees mostly from meeting them on industry-specific IRC channels. The initial 5 or 6 employees including myself never met each other until a number of years later when we could afford flights/hotels to have a company sponsored event. After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder. The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done. This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable. I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.

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Melatonic 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You might benefit from a timer for kids like the Time Timer. Or if there's a close coffee shop or something just meet someone there occasionally and work remote together

	▲	kshacker 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh I live a short distance from my office. Coffee shop will be as close to the office I just can't go. My son has intractable epilepsy and I don't want my wife to be home alone managing this. Getting someone to come sit with you at home (as my proxy) waiting for a situation to happen is lot more abnormal than me just staying home. My wife and I do step out for groceries and chores obviously so it is not 100% black and white and I used to go to office for lunch every week but the habit degrades over quarters. But I can try to reboot it.