I discussed the same points on Reddit recently and the one that I focused on as well was the aspect of just my physical health.

When I'm at home I have a fully stocked kitchen, my fridge with all my ingredients and no competition for any of it. What it means is when I'm working from home, I eat healthier and lead a healthier lifestyle. I save money on food because the laziness to not pack a lunch doesn't exist.

The commute in mornings is stressful (especially around this time of year where roads become treacherous with rain/snow with melt+freeze cycles). Without that commute I can wake up at 6:30, shower, eat and be "at my desk" by 7:00 while the on-site work has me waking up at 5:30.

There's just so many benefits to remote work. I'm happier, and therefore more productive on that matter alone. I don't even need to get into all the reasons you covered why work at my office is far worse

Remote work saves me ~$300/month in extra child care, or else having to work so late that by the time I get home my kids are going to bed because the other option is not being able to reach an office until 9:30-9:45, by letting me get them where they need to be at the right time instead of early (which costs money—before-school programs, early care at daycare, that kind of thing).

Plus savings in gas and wear & tear on my car. Hell when all my kids are in regular k-12 school and I can just toss them on the bus, we could drop to one car easily, too, saving even more money.

So, remote work: worth probably $6000/yr to me now in sheer cash savings, call it $10k for time saved and lower stress. Worth maybe $15k in a couple years when all my kids can ride the bus. Not friggin' bad. Oh and despite the kids (disease carriers that they are) I'm still sick like 1/2 as often, so that's nice.

Plus I can prep ingredients for dinner over lunch or while on a call that doesn't need 100% of my attention or whatever. Measure stuff, chop some veggies, set it aside, back to work. We've been eating so much better (and cheaper) since I went remote.

Looking like that'll end soon which has me pretty bummed, though. Remote is just so much better. Any music I want (or none), get up and walk around, work from any room or out on the deck. No shared bathroom, hahaha. Offices are expensive time-wasting misery factories by comparison.

You nailed my experience entirely. Every point. Working remote was incredible and I hope to find that again. I wish you the best of luck.

This is absolutely true. I live in rural New York and weather here this time of year is awful. I've watched cars in front of me during my commute slide off into the ditch wondering if I was going to be next.

I am also a father of 3 so being remote gave me the ability to attend school activities, doctors appointments, and just being there for them more which I know means a lot to them - as it does to me. There is also the little things like a trip to the dentist which could take me ~30 minutes remote and I can do it on my lunch break. Now on-site I have the commute so I need to take a 1/2 day which in turn causes a loss of productivity for the company.

My friend, you should have quit this company as soon as the remote work "trial" ended. The trial was great for you: you tried something new, learned new things about yourself (turns out, you prefer remote work - what a surprise!), and you discovered that your employer isn't the right one for you. The company is making you miserable; it really is time to move on. I hope you find a better place soon.

Quitting is the easy part if you don't have anything better lined up. Some people just go for it and always seem to fall on their feet. Others hesitate forever.

I'm not sure if it's clear from your comments above, but was the one year "trial" set up as an experiment, with controls and measurements? In other words, "in 2017, we were not remote, and we measured xx results. in 2018, we were fully remote and we measured yy results." Or literally, let's "pow wow" the upper management and ask them about their feelings?

I think I know the answer. I know that this is the ongoing core problem - measuring "results" is really hard. Running a business means "experiments" are expensive, and really difficult to control in a way that you can get some kind of scientific learning out of them.

I think about the Jim Collins books which were written based on decades-long studies. Certainly imperfect and vulnerable to survivorship-bias and various other issues, but still perhaps better information than any single company is able to come up with for themselves on what tactics would benefit their company more or less than others. (i.e. they may use successful tactics and profit, without knowing what the opportunity cost may be.)

To be honest, no, it wasn't really made out to be a trial when this came to be.

As a growing company of around 400 employees, we were really short on space and software is one of those fields that do quite well remotely. We were asked if we were interested and we officially went remote a week later. Since then, a new building was built solving our space issue so I think that had a lot to do with our return. The communication "disconnect" I think was just a way for management to justify the reversal of the decision.

We used Pivotol Tracker[0] to track our performance so if anything we had proof of how well remote worked for us - but some people fail to see the positives of remote work even with the proof right in front of them.

[0] - https://www.pivotaltracker.com/

Is it possible that your personal productivity soared but the trial was still a net negative for the company?

In my opinion, no. If anything we likely only benefited the company. Our department has very low costs and those costs would have occurred whether we were on site or not. When we were remote we used the communication tools that were already provided to the entire company. What we didn't use (benefiting the company) was electricity, water, space to occupy, network bandwidth, etc.

The productivity increase of being remote resulted in apps/updates to occur much quicker. We were able to take advantage of many things we now had access to such as faster internet, IPv6, better network experiences (no more IP conflicts, blocked web sites/filtering, other IT nonsense), self managing our desktops, and so on.

Right, you and other developers were more productive and were able to make quicker updates. But was the company as strategically aligned at a high level? Was the engineering team as a whole able to react quickly and efficiently to strategic shifts that are more a matter of communication than coding? Were different teams able to juggle competing priorities as effectively as before? These are all elements of running the company that could be negatively impacted by remote work, and they are also areas into which many developers will not have much visibility, if any at all.

To be clear, I'm not actually trying to argue against remote work in general. I think it can be done very well if the company is built around it from the bottom to the top. My point is just that one has to examine the effect on the entire organization. It might be the case that some groups benefited but at a cost that wasn't worth it at a high level. For instance, it could be that the organization needs a much more rigorous planning process rolled out to every single team before remote work becomes a net positive.

Ah I see what you are asking. The company I work for designs, builds and sells medical devices. The software team's role is more focused on improving the workflow of other departments or building tools that help with more general company wide needs (interactive campus maps, kiosks, corporate directory applications).

Example would be a tool I built for a team member that works with flex licenses (Autodesk, etc). He has a command line tool that lists how our licenses are used but it's a pretty verbose dump which isn't fun to read manually. I wrote a parser for this command and wrapped it up in a web app which provides a table of all users, charts on usage, data storing for historical metrics and so on. He is now able to better understand our usage and can more accurately guess as to when we need to purchase more licenses. He can also see what we are not using to reduce our company costs.

The things we've built don't go through any "system" and are developed simply between the requester and the software team (nothing really public so far, all internal tools). As a result, our increased speed is only a positive. However, I can understand in other companies when increased code/updates would cause tons of stress on the teams so your point is valid.

> I wrote a parser for this command

Were you able to effectively collect requirements for that tool while working remotely or collecting requirements required on-site interaction?

Yep, honestly it was almost like I never left.

I used a VPN so I was almost constantly connected to our company network. At the company we don't do a lot of face-to-face meetings (typically only the older management folks here prefer that). Most of us use chat or email but I also get the occasional phone call. This project was pretty straight forward where the employee made a request and actually was able to send us the online documentation of the commands and we were able to take it from there. We built a prototype of what he was looking for and we made some minor tweaks after his initial review.

We did come on-site at least once a week (sometimes more if it was needed) but they were mostly reserved for those occasional face-to-face meetings or when we were setting up a BLE Mesh Network for workorder tracking.

The best time to start interviewing was when they forced you back on site. The second best time is today.

Don't forget to include opportunity cost of time driving when calculating the cost of your commute. Your time is valuable. I think you'll find you spend way more than $6000/year on commuting. If you value your free time at $25/hour and commute 250 days per year, that's another $6250 per year in opportunity cost.

I recommend starting a search for a better job immediately. That way you can take your time. When you leave, be sure to tell them the reasons that you laid out here.

When was the last time you brushed up your resume and put it out there? When was the last time you looked for new job openings?

To answer your question honestly, it has been a long time. At this company I transitioned from a Graphic Designer to a Software Developer. After my first year I took the role of a Web Developer and ended up building a custom internal application for the Art Department which opened a lot of eyes at the possibilities of what a Software Department could provide.

I was employee #1 in this new role and have since made a lot of really awesome things such as a company directory (mobile app), dashboards for our fabrication department, license management software for our IT folks, visitor check-in/out kiosks, interactive surgical simulators for our R&D/Sales teams, to name a few.

I hold a BS degree in Art. While in college, I took some web development courses and that is when I first started noticing my interest in programming. Despite having ~10 years of programming experience (~4 being as a professional software dev) I am not the most confident developer and the horror of software dev interviews scares me. Maybe it is time to go for it - worst they can say is no, right?

Just go for it. Interviewing is like any other scary thing in life: throw yourself into it enough times and it isn't. I used to be scared of jumping off a diving board, and scared of riding a bike until I did both of those things many times as well.

There's a huge salary penalty if you're not constantly looking for the best offers out there (do some Googling to convince yourself this is true). Don't worry about your imposter syndrome -- let others determine if you can get the job or not.

Elite software companies have ridiculous interviews, it's true, and you have to spend at least tens of hours practicing them. But everyone else is pretty reasonable, I've found. There are lots of enterprise shops that don't care about that nonsense.

The salary penalty is very true. I have noticed that Software Developers do tend to job-hop quite often taking better and better offers. Time to update my resume I believe!

I don't think you need to "go for it" as much as just be aware of what else is out there. It's also empowering to have your resume up to date so that if your feeling down and hating work, there's one less barrier in the way of changing your situation.

I appreciate your kind words. I'll look around some job boards and see if anything looks interesting!