I know that personally the most productive I've ever been was attending an office each day which had people co-located in rooms of 4-7 people by team / project.

I absolutely love my remote situation, it's 1000% better for my general happiness (I feel like my work is a part of my life rather than something which puts my life on hold) and stress levels, and there are days where I can be very productive, but due to the simple factor of motivation and the symbiosis which can occur in co-located teams it simply doesn't compare to the productivity I experienced as a part of a good team in a well-planned office.

As an employee I definitely prefer remote, but as a (heartless) employer optimising only for medium term productivity (and ignoring the trade-offs of overheads etc) it wouldn't be so straightforward and would probably depend on the people and projects.

Edit to add: here I'm talking about productivity as quality output per unit time

I think remote work can theoretically be a lot more productive for solo-ish tasks like coding. On some days this is definitely the case for me, after I pull marathon coding sessions that likely couldn't have really happened so smoothly in an office setting. For some days or weeks where I'm consistently in the "zone", I really feel like I've gotten more done than I could've if I spent those days in an office.

But in practice, unless you have very high self-discipline, you're probably going to be battling motivation and boredom to some degree on a daily basis. You often might in an office, too, but it's not the same. In an office, you see everyone else working around you, probably talking about work, some of whom can see your screen (maybe not ever actually looking, but still in line of sight), and that's a potent cocktail for human psychology. At home, you're in or right near the same place you watch TV and movies and relax and sleep, alone or with your SO/family, and there's probably nothing really going on around you, so the environment is basically the same as your non-work environment. There's nothing around to light a fire under your ass.

I also prefer remote work, but I'm definitely trying to find ways to feel more motivated and symbiotic, and am interested in ways a manager or employer could help foster that for remote employees. I've been trying to work from coffee shops more, and that sometimes seems to help.

My place is trying remote, and sometimes I'm more productive in the office. However, if I get in the zone at home I will accomplish significantly more. I would definitely rather go outside for 10 minutes to take a break instead of chatting in the office. Unfortunately, it seems like there is no attention on how to make people more comfortable and engaged.

Too many places dip their toes in the water, but as a remote employee, I can sniff out immediately if a team is ‘backchanneling’ in the office, starting or ending meetings before/after the remote call is over, etc.

If the team is not remote-first, living and breathing with the sense that nothing should be isolated in a single physical location, it’s not going to be fun, especially for the remote workers.

It can sort of work in a sense where everyone gets together for some time, then everyone breaks off and does something, then they get back together.

But more often I see a team where 3 people are in the office, and 2 or 3 are remote—I’ve never seen this model be successful in the long run.

This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring. With the accompanying negative effect on US developer salaries. Indeed companies should be focusing on this significantly!

The (microeconomic) problem with offshoring is that other countries (think of India, to use a stereotype) have a quite different level of education, work morale, sense of quality etc. That is why it worked so badly. On the other hand, inside a common cultural area, this should be much less of an issue.

We get excellent work out of India, with the primary downsides being the related factors of 10.5 hour time zone difference to either US coast and higher demands for coordination/communication.

If India was in a time zone with more overlap with the US, the situation would be far more dire for the average US software developer I think.

If you go in and just want "lots of bodies, cheap", you're going to light money on fire, waste your time, and pull your hair out.

You shouldn't determine how much you charge by how much you need to survive, but charge instead by how much the company can afford to pay, or how much they're going to make (harder to determine the latter).

After all, the company doesn't price its products by how much it needs to stay solvent, it prices them by how much they can get people to pay.

Let's rather put it this way: the company saves money; if they give some amount of the savings back to the employee (via salary), both sides should be satisfied.

Yes. I work remotely from Uruguay. It´s basically the only option to compete with U.S. talent, the whole point of remote work for the company is to get the best talent at a price they wouldn´t get in the U.S.

I know that if I get an H1B visa or whatever my salary would immediately go up. Location and salary are unfortunately correlated (it´s not even cost of living, Uruguay is more expensive than 2/3rds of the U.S.).