8/19/2026 at 4:02:26 PM
…of a single company> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
by Aurornis
8/19/2026 at 6:33:16 PM
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
by pixelready
8/19/2026 at 10:31:53 PM
From what I have seen, layoffs tend to go hand in hand with pushing for more work from the office (which companies hope will help them get rid of some employees without severance), so if being in the office helps combat layoff paranoia and depression, there's that.I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
by rob74
8/20/2026 at 3:02:11 AM
You say your team is remote "anyway", but RTO precisely is about connecting with other people OUTSIDE your team, working on internal politics, and you act as an interconnection point between the remote team and the local network.by eastbound
8/20/2026 at 5:31:03 AM
I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
by techcode
8/20/2026 at 6:03:55 AM
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.by rob74
8/19/2026 at 8:08:56 PM
Vent ahead:I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
by lowercased
8/20/2026 at 7:45:35 PM
Next time go to your manager and say "I'm seriously considering axing this project and I want your approval to do so. x, y, and z are no longer applicable and the landscape of the client relationship has changed in the interim as well."by butlike
8/20/2026 at 8:07:49 AM
That's kafkaesque and reads totally surreal ... but I have seen enough to know it is possible.by ozim
8/20/2026 at 11:23:29 AM
re: department head at our company about 4 levels above me... -- what could be going through this person's mind when they continue yelling at someone after the situation has been explained? A friend got screamed at by some upper level person for being three months behind on a project. They contined screaming even after my friend explained it was his first day at the company.by jimmydddd
8/19/2026 at 7:48:05 PM
> amplified over SlackSlack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
by zer00eyz
8/19/2026 at 9:10:19 PM
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
by neilv
8/19/2026 at 11:35:51 PM
I love my remote company for being mostly cameras off. We’re not even a small company at all. It’s so much less stressful than constantly being on Zoom on camera.I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
by Grombobulous
8/19/2026 at 7:24:00 PM
This is when you find a new WFH position. Imagine how bad it would be working in an office with sociopaths that want all of those things?by slowin
8/19/2026 at 5:14:35 PM
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
by Xirdus
8/20/2026 at 3:00:42 AM
It really depends on the company culture. Where I work (in the bay area) people come to the office two days a week, but those days are when everybody schedule the important in person meetings. Focused work happens rest of the weekdays at home.by esalman
8/19/2026 at 5:59:41 PM
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
by naravara
8/19/2026 at 7:50:26 PM
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.by tedggh
8/20/2026 at 3:03:19 AM
I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
by tpmoney
8/20/2026 at 4:12:29 PM
I'm the same way. I absolutely need a commute and a hard bifurcation of my work and personal environments. I've been paying for coworking services of some kind since COVID. That and having a separate work phone has helped a lot.by nunez
8/20/2026 at 6:00:32 PM
My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
by naravara
8/19/2026 at 8:29:55 PM
100% agree. I'm the exact opposite of the grandparent - I get much better work done on my wfh days because I'm not drained by the commute.by zem
8/19/2026 at 10:42:59 PM
I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me up so I pretty much gave it up.)by ghaff
8/20/2026 at 5:14:20 AM
I used to live 15 min walk, 5 min bike ride from an office i was required to go to twice a month. It was a nice commute.Then I moved and now its a 30 min drive. Not a nice commute.
by abustamam
8/20/2026 at 5:26:42 AM
I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a rare state of emergency.Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
by ghaff
8/19/2026 at 10:25:00 PM
In the last twelve months ive had electricians, plumbers, kitchen renovators all work in my home while I was wfh. In an age gone by I would burn annual leave to deal with this. I dont know how I could handle the logistics of full in office again.by technion
8/20/2026 at 5:14:55 AM
It makes me wonder what people did before WFH was prevalent!by abustamam
8/20/2026 at 6:01:45 PM
Stay-at-home moms/housewives were the load bearing pillar for that whole lifestyle.by naravara
8/21/2026 at 2:22:32 AM
Not sure if you intended to sound like Claude. If so, well played :)by abustamam
8/21/2026 at 1:27:05 PM
They didn’t sound like Claude; Claude sounds like them.by nativeit
8/19/2026 at 6:22:40 PM
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.by harvey9
8/19/2026 at 5:21:36 PM
I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.by jambalaya8
8/19/2026 at 6:01:01 PM
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
by JohnMakin
8/19/2026 at 7:03:23 PM
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline. But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.by theclansman
8/19/2026 at 7:31:05 PM
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.by mylies43
8/20/2026 at 10:27:15 AM
> The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour windowThat's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
by account42
8/19/2026 at 6:16:17 PM
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
by hiAndrewQuinn
8/19/2026 at 11:22:34 PM
>By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with.This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
by wing-_-nuts
8/19/2026 at 4:26:53 PM
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.by foobarian
8/19/2026 at 4:35:54 PM
Yeah this is the primary disconnect because management is more extroverted and so they hated remote / don't see why some want it.by steveBK123
8/20/2026 at 3:18:55 AM
I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen.We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages.
And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.
by tpmoney
8/19/2026 at 6:15:08 PM
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing.Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
by sunaurus
8/19/2026 at 10:15:45 PM
I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a lot of people. I'm familiar with one company that really hesitated to shove a lot of people into an official (as opposed to remote) category but they eventually gave up after closing some offices.by ghaff
8/19/2026 at 7:35:49 PM
My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea.I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
by gopher_space
8/19/2026 at 11:05:30 PM
$20k for the company to facilitate your workspace or $20k of net cost to you the employee to comply with RTO? If the latter and assuming a reasonable commute (15-35 minutes) one way how did you arrive at that number?by DiggyJohnson
8/20/2026 at 11:27:06 PM
The first step is nailing down the numbers that everyone understands and agrees with.I start with the stated wage on a job description and attempt to calculate the value of any additional benefits to arrive at the hourly rate a potential employer thinks my time is worth. Vehicle cost is similarly straightforward since wear and mileage calculators are standardized and you're already budgeting for parking if you need to.
However. Once you collect a handful of data points the rest of the process is entirely personal. For example, a one-hour commute each way sounds terrible unless that's the only time in the day you have to yourself, but if the traffic is never smooth or you need to switch trains three times it might be a wash.
The key point is to determine if a specific activity is solely work-related and if I get anything else out of it, and then apply the dollar value this potential employer sets on my time as above.
Now take a look at your food situation. Do you and your partner meal prep every Sunday without fail? Do you start your day at the Starbucks drive thru? Now take a look at your responsibilities. Do you have children? Do you have pets? Now take a look at your wardrobe. The list goes on and it's all situational.
The interesting part of the project was seeing how much home location + commute options + work location affect net pay by just dragging a few markers around a map of the city. I was adding average residential rent by location last time I touched this and felt like the project was turning into a map of the de facto minimum wage in my area.
To answer your question this was $20k net to me, mainly from maintaining a vehicle, eating out of the house, and keeping up my in-office appearance.
by gopher_space
8/20/2026 at 5:31:29 AM
Well on the employee side it’s more complicated than you think. You have gas, yes, and then mileage on your car. And then working in an office means you have to take more time off to deal with mundane things like “the plumber is coming today”. And then 30 minutes of commute is 1 hour a day, which lowers your effective wage. And then of course there’s various other costs like food being more difficult and expensive, higher risk of serious bodily harm or death due to automobile use, and the biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain.Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
by preg_match
8/20/2026 at 12:52:23 PM
> biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gainThis is I think where hybrid (with weekly attendance) really makes more sense in theory than in practice, ending up as worst of both worlds depending.
With in-office you pay a premium for location that is good for commuting.
With remote you can choose a cheaper location without the commute constraint (maybe 50% off), somewhat offset by needing more space to setup a proper home office (add back 10-20%).
With hybrid you still need to be close enough that 2 days/week of commuting is tolerable and ALSO need space for a home office.
by steveBK123
8/20/2026 at 6:06:06 AM
I guess if you consider your commute as purely work time then it starts making more sense. Maybe I’m unusual in that I don’t loathe my commute and see the time as 100% personal time.by DiggyJohnson
8/20/2026 at 6:31:43 AM
The way I view it is that personal time means time id spend if work didn’t exist. If work didn’t exist, I wouldn’t commute. So, to me, it’s work time.Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists.
I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
by preg_match
8/20/2026 at 10:34:04 AM
I generally agree that commute should count as work time more often than not but its complicated when you can take advantage of the commute to get other things done near your work site or along the route. E.g. if you commonly stop to get groceries half way from work to your home then perhaps you would have needed to spend time for that trip anyway. But that's more of an excuse for a 30 minute or less commute, not for over an hour.by account42
8/20/2026 at 9:07:28 PM
I absolutely think employee's would try to game it if companies paid out commute time. Some companies do pay out travel time, which is a similar concept. I think you just have to accept some amount of gaming, that's life.On the employee side, the solution is to ALWAYS factor in your commute time. A job that pays 20,000 dollars more a year can easily not be worth it if the commute is insane. If you have to double your rent to make it work, it's probably not worth it.
I factor in commute like I factor in other benefits, like health insurance and PTO. My salary can't necessarily replace those, so they implicitly have a higher value than money alone. It would take a really nice salary to override them. And I think that's why we see absurd salaries in places like Seattle. They know employee's are doing this calculus, they can't afford to pay 100,000 like you can in, say, Texas.
by preg_match
8/19/2026 at 11:25:52 PM
For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards.I will never go back.
by wing-_-nuts
8/19/2026 at 4:12:42 PM
How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?by soupfordummies
8/19/2026 at 5:16:32 PM
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
by Aurornis
8/19/2026 at 5:45:52 PM
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
by vector_spaces
8/19/2026 at 5:22:37 PM
Thank you. This. The backstabbing and passive aggression are so much more trenchant.by jambalaya8
8/20/2026 at 3:26:01 AM
It strikes me how broad the range in work experiences are. I have never had coworkers who cared about anything besides getting the work done. The idea of politics in the workplace is foreign to me, but I know it is common.by shigawire
8/21/2026 at 12:16:47 AM
I had a lot more of that experience before the first dotcom bubble burst. Harder and harder to not know your coworkers political beliefs even if they do not talk about them at work now.by jambalaya8
8/19/2026 at 4:41:43 PM
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
by mercanlIl
8/19/2026 at 5:00:03 PM
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.by toomuchtodo
8/19/2026 at 9:13:10 PM
You also share a professional social network which is something you own separately from any company and I have found to be very valuable and strengthened by in-person work.by guelo
8/20/2026 at 12:57:18 AM
I've worked remote most of my career. Starting in the late 90's if you squint hard enough.I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
by phil21
8/19/2026 at 5:05:44 PM
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.by jambalaya8
8/19/2026 at 5:13:54 PM
> Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.because, as someone else i replied to in the thread points out, miserable employees perform worse.
by dijksterhuis
8/19/2026 at 8:40:28 PM
I am curious, do believe that a company or an employee is responsible for paying for a ersatz "coworking space" (ersatz, in that the employer did not choose that as a place for their employees to work)?by jambalaya8
8/20/2026 at 11:25:23 AM
me personally? the company up to a reasonable point. it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure they provide a suitable working space.then again i live in the UK where we actually have workers rights.
by dijksterhuis
8/19/2026 at 7:37:29 PM
I get that. I said as much. Though suggesting employers should have no say in where their employees work on generally work protected by intellectual property law is tricky. If they have an office, usually that is where they want you to work if the goal is an office setting. Some companies do not and rent out coworking space. Different.by jambalaya8
8/19/2026 at 10:11:04 PM
Very anecdotally, it seems to go both ways. If there is a relatively local office, people are generally expected to go in. If there isn't, the employee often pays (but not always).by ghaff
8/20/2026 at 1:51:49 AM
I believe some tax accountants say it can be used as a write-off (just like a certain number of square feet of where you live, if it is only and demonstrably for that). But as far as preference, I would be surprised if a company with an office somewhere near would be pleased with you working in a coworking space. Maybe some but big companies, probably legal issues (VPN or not).by jambalaya8
8/20/2026 at 5:11:12 AM
My accountant always told me maybe but there are conditions and it's a red flag.by ghaff
8/19/2026 at 5:30:19 PM
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
by tikhonj
8/19/2026 at 7:06:34 PM
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
by elmer2
8/19/2026 at 5:30:17 PM
It’s also circumstantial.Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.
Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.
It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.
The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.
by coffeefirst
8/19/2026 at 7:13:42 PM
For me it's always been the opposite: Stuck with so many people around, always talking, always things going on and draining me. No way to focus.Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.
by kstenerud
8/19/2026 at 8:28:47 PM
I'm right in the middle.By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
by alistairSH
8/19/2026 at 5:29:13 PM
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
by b1gTekken
8/19/2026 at 7:07:23 PM
Are you saying me telling Claude to improve a process by 1% to increase shareholder value isn't meaningful and contributing to society? How dare you!by theclansman
8/19/2026 at 9:25:01 PM
But wait; there's more; the code written a decade ago manually was also just to increase shareholder value!by b1gTekken
8/19/2026 at 9:45:10 PM
Also Zoom.I know a number of folks that work remote, and they are on Zoom, all day.
That would drive me nuts! [actually, it's not really a drive; more of a short putt -Ed.]
I use Zoom frequently, but always find it to be exhausting. I guess that's just me, though.
But I'm also retired, and really leaning into not ever going back into the office again.
by ChrisMarshallNY
8/19/2026 at 9:49:08 PM
>I guess that's just me, though.It's definitely not just you. It's the "camera on" portion that exhausts me. I do frequent Teams audio calls throughout the day as my team is across a very large area. When I interview candidates, it's generally camera on and I can only do 1-2 day.
by giarc
8/19/2026 at 11:07:02 PM
Turn the selfie viewport off if possible. It’s the only reason that camera on meetings feel worse than in person meetings.by DiggyJohnson
8/19/2026 at 7:51:39 PM
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
by pseudosavant
8/19/2026 at 4:51:45 PM
I absolutely detest this framing of remote vs onsite. What it really is is accommodated vs not-accommodated.Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
by mrsilencedogood
8/19/2026 at 5:19:02 PM
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
by Aurornis
8/19/2026 at 5:35:09 PM
> In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
by dijksterhuis
8/19/2026 at 8:38:30 PM
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
by deathanatos
8/19/2026 at 11:11:21 PM
What is "hot desking"? Is it as horrifying as it sounds?by encrypted_bird
8/19/2026 at 11:51:35 PM
It's where you're in a pen with rows of desks and you just have to use whichever desk is free, you don't have your own desk. If you have any stuff you need to work beyond what's on the desk (say, accessibility equipment), you might get a locker (these are often underprovisioned) and you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every day. It is awful.by SupremumLimit
8/20/2026 at 12:02:40 AM
That...sounds horrific. Oh my goodness.by encrypted_bird
8/20/2026 at 12:51:38 AM
>you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every dayYeah, you might. I assume you're a principled person.
In my experience, the less principled simply leave their shit all over the place for us to deal with.
by windward
8/20/2026 at 10:58:47 AM
Why blame them? They didn't create the shitty environment.by account42
8/21/2026 at 12:13:56 AM
I blame them because they're the ones taking advantageby windward
8/19/2026 at 11:10:07 PM
I’ve found the discourse around commute times to be incredibly hyperbolic. 90 minute one-way commutes are an extreme outlier for professionals (USA). Genuinely like two standard deviations from normal.by DiggyJohnson
8/19/2026 at 4:59:40 PM
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
by dijksterhuis
8/19/2026 at 6:37:44 PM
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
by jp57
8/20/2026 at 4:09:37 AM
Don’t coworking spaces solve some of the issues? I am one of these people that hates working from home and loves going to the office - the chat with colleagues, the exercise of bicycling to the office and back, the context switching between work and not work - otherwise I loose myself in the work. All of that is awesome for me.When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
by seer
8/20/2026 at 8:13:53 AM
I worked remote my entire life, I have never worked in the office (I did occasionally go for socialization purposes at one company), that's 20 years working remote. Would that be sufficient of a proof?I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
by Fire-Dragon-DoL
8/19/2026 at 9:00:35 PM
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame outI'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
by jghn
8/19/2026 at 9:23:01 PM
Yeah it is not a remote good / office bad thing.I work remote when and how I want, it's great.
But there's days and even weeks where "I just want to go in" and that's helpful with meetings, work, socialization.
Different people like different modes and even at different times.
by duxup
8/19/2026 at 6:00:48 PM
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.by buddhistdude
8/19/2026 at 7:05:33 PM
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
by gopher_space
8/19/2026 at 7:35:30 PM
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.by slowin
8/19/2026 at 7:14:06 PM
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
by paul7986
8/20/2026 at 1:47:54 PM
All this equally applies to working in the office.The best is remote with an option to come into the office.
This way you are maximizing flexibility and allowing workers to self select into their preferred way of working.
Anything else is suboptimal.
by wanderlust123
8/19/2026 at 4:34:02 PM
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home lifeThis used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
by pydry
8/19/2026 at 6:32:37 PM
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
by tikhonj
8/19/2026 at 7:08:34 PM
oh for sure.this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
by pydry
8/19/2026 at 5:11:55 PM
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
by gusmally
8/19/2026 at 5:20:51 PM
"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
by dijksterhuis
8/19/2026 at 7:02:48 PM
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
by pydry