> Why on earth would it matter where your desk is? It matters to product managers. Managing remote team is more difficult therefore PMs will always push against this.
Why is it more difficult? Do you have some data or anecdotes to back up your claim? I'm really interested. I've been working remotely for years now, and my relationships with the various PMs I've had has always been: talk about what needs to be done, and then be left alone to actually do it, check back when I have progress or if I have outstanding questions that arose from better understanding the problem domain. Plu…
First, I think it's important to point out that there's a difference between a fully distributed team and a mostly-local team with some remote members. A lot (not all) of the problems have to do with the disparity between the colocated and non-colocated workers. For example, the colocated majority in a mixed team will often cling to old habits wrt soliciting or providing feedback/approval on commits, conveying important news, etc. Just turn your head a bit and speak a bit louder; everyone will get the cue and listen in. Ditto for learning new tricks by hearing or seeing someone near you. There's no incentive for them to do anything but what works for them. On a fully distributed team people do develop alternatives because they have to.
Other things that are more difficult remote include anything involving a whiteboard, from design discussions to planning sessions. Online alternatives are never as good. Inability to participate in group social activities, or to detect nuance in conversation based on tone of voice (where a fully distributed team would come up with textual alternatives) can lead to a surprisingly quick erosion of mutual trust. This is why people who do work "full time" remotely - like me BTW - still benefit from frequent in-person visits.
> Is this uncommon across the industry?
I think your experience sounds a bit exceptional, but there's probably a lot of variance according to technical area and project characteristics. For me, working on a large codebase with lots of hidden coupling so that no individual project can be accomplished without tight collaboration at least across the dozen-person immediate team (if not the broader 40-person team), being remote is a real handicap. Can/should the codebase be fixed? Sure, but that project itself requires even tighter coordination until it's done. Were I to attempt it, I'd have to be on-site for months.
I think there are more bad codebases and weak teams than there are the opposite, so my guess would be that my experience (and this is not the first team in which I've been a remote minority) is not far from the norm.