I disagree with you, specifically one point.

>The office does offer some perks, but they are not related to work itself, they are all about socializing / banter / feeling of being part of a team.

That "banter" or "socializing" is work related. I've found that working from home (been doing it 2 years now) has one very big disadvantage - unless the whole team is remote.

You will be excluded from meetings, decisions and conversations. You will always have a feeling that you're missing something. You will miss important hallway conversations that can impact the work you do.

Any talk of new clients, potential new business, larger future projects are all communicated to me once they are mostly already hashed out. This keeps me from playing a bigger part in the company and thus the work they throw my way is more on the grunt/boring side.

I love working remotely though and I'm not working in the tiny open office they have. I would be interested in seeing what the dynamic is like with a full remote team.

I think there's a few things you have to realise about working at home: - you get to avoid almost all office politics - you will eventually lose at office politics

Essentially you need to have a manager who will step up and root for you, and you guys need to talk so he/she knows where your head is at

Yup. We are small enough that we all report directly to the CEO. Though anywhere I've worked remotely or not it is always me looking out for me. Never had a manager help with that.

I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.

Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.

https://www.ft.com/content/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AUQIVz...

Oh, the bliss.

So the home versus office axis is the wrong one to think about. The deciding factor is how well one can work in which place and that depends on a lot more than home versus office.

There's a reason that coworking or small office spaces are so popular these days: for $500/month in many places, you get your own little office with a door that shuts where you can concentrate on your work, or a quiet cubicle among other people with similar situations. If everyone was able to make working at home work for them, these places would not exist.

I've got a three year old who is used to me working from home and doesn't cause any problems at all.

I also know of far more people who complain of being constantly interrupted by managers and noise in an open plan office. Its not like modern offices are an oasis of calm.

And yes, open offices are horrible this way too. That's why we're having this discussion about people wanting to work from home: for many, it's a lot better than the chaos at the open-plan office at work, even if it isn't ideal. For others, it's at least as bad (kids/wife), so they either deal with the office, or they go to a coffee shop or rent a coworking space or similar.

My daughters love it when I work from home, so they're very supportive of my boundaries.

What's the point of living in an ultra-expensive region if you work from home?

2. silicon valley is a nice place to live in.

I WFH a couple days a week just so I can make up for the lack of productivity from the three days at the office.