People love working remotely

I am in the process of making a major life change to focus on remote first work. I've recently moved and I am currently looking to purchase a house in a small town from where I plan to work full-time.

I think the caveats people bring up are serious and require careful consideration. They are part of why I am trying to find a company that is "remote-first" and I would prefer to avoid companies where I am one of a handful of remote employees while the rest of the team is co-located in one or more offices.

My major fears are:

* I suffer from isolation and loneliness and it impacts my mental well-being

* I find my career progression stalled

* I miss out on more lucrative compensation

* I find my coworkers making decisions without consulting me

* I experience an increase in general anxiety

* I find my productivity and focus to be significantly less

* I am unable to balance work/life when they are combined in the same place

The worst case scenario is that a combination of my fears being realized forces me to recognize my unsuitability for remote work. I would then be stuck in a smaller city with less opportunity, potentially with a mortgage. I might be forced to sell my home for a loss, to move back into a bigger city and to attempt to find a normal job to rebuild my retirement savings.

My plan to mitigate these is to be aware of my fears and to put into place strategies that can deal with each one. I believe that companies that plan to be remote-reliant in the future will need expertise at the management level to deal with those issues throughout their workforce. Where there is legitimate fear there is also opportunity. I believe that all of the problems associated with remote work can be handled if they are openly discussed.

I don't think remote work is that good. It has its benefits like having more time, flexible schedule and work from where you want but this comes at a price: you work alone every day, your colleagues are in different timezones, you need to set hard rules on your work schedule and socializing is a must. Think of all the things you get for granted working from an office: colleagues, events, pair programming, face to face meetings, small talk breaks. Again I do agree the remote work has its benefits but everything comes at a cost.

It's practically impossible to get rid of that bit of the cargo-cult thinking. It's funny because it's not even really a part of "Agile", just Scrum. The best Scrum team I've ever worked with (and best team really, that's probably part of it) decided to drop daily meetings and it was great. We did keep the end/start of sprint stuff, because that was important to us.

One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement").

One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.

I work very far from my office, and on the 1-2 days a week I do go in, it's an hour and a half each way. For the wife, it's 2 full hours each way. Totally not worth it day to day, but it's a nice change of pace for the 1-2 days I go in. Keeps things fresh, and I take a bus the whole way there.

That being said, if my job was, say, a 20 minute commute, I'd go in probably 3 or 4 days a week, assuming the office was nice. I prefer working in person at times, it really depends on what I'm doing, but the option is what makes it work for me. 100% remote would only make me happy for so long, I think.

Also, rarely discussed in these types of posts is that your social abilities definitely diminish if you work from home a lot and rarely interact with people. I've noticed it in myself and made a conscious push to get into the office more often to offset that.

Without making a statement for or against remote work, this:

> People like to harp on the failings of remote work. Loneliness. Distractions. Not unplugging. Lack of collaboration. Dog hair.

> But in reality, people love working remotely. And they’re willing to forgive its failings because it’s just that good.

does not follow from a survey asking remote workers if they like working remotely.