One of the problems of remote work is that it’s kind of an all or nothing thing for your team. If some people are in the office and some people work from home, inevitably (in my experience) a lot of small decisions get made in the office without consulting the remote workers. And that creates a divide - the people in the office end up with more power and authority than the remote folks.

Some teams fight this with some strict rules - eg insisting conversations between people sitting next to each other happen over slack. But I think it will usually work better in the long run if either everyone is in the office or basically everyone is remote.

I understand what you're saying but only with respect to global remote hires. I've seen the same attempts to fight it. But with local hires and optional wfh you just let that sort of problem work itself out. If the by-choice wfh person feels like they are left out its on them to do something about it. Its a personal problem not a team problem.

“You’re welcome to work from home, so long as you’re happy being systematically forgotten about in team decisions and passed over for promotions.”

Yeah, that’d definitely work itself out; but it’s not what I would describe as a remote friendly workplace.

I can't tell what you're arguing. An employee makes a daily conscious decision to wfh and is then upset about any consequences of doing so? Is this person an adult?

I think it’s ridiculous to accept those sort of downsides for remote workers. Working remotely doesn’t have to be a second class citizen to working from the office. It takes work to set up, but it can work great.

This is not ideal. Ideal is everyone at home or everyone in the office. Half half leads to people being left out.

I was forced to WFH, same as most of my colleagues. Most who keep going to work don't really have much choice (apart from resigning for which ain't the best time now). What are you talking about?

> Ideally

You missed a key word in the parent post.

_Ideally_ people wouldn't be forced into multiple hour long commutes either, but that has been the reality for many before this year.

Comparing being "forced" to commute hours (in a house that you chose to live in when you took the job) is a bit disingenuous to being actually forced by a pandemic to not go into an office.

Im happy for all the people that can live happily hours outside of urban areas but the insistence that remote work is uniformly better for all people is just so exhausting. I for one, will be glad when it ends and will continue to prioritize companies that keep most of their work force in office; bringing work into my living space has been terrible for my mental health (anecdotally this sentiment has been shared among other single young people i know in the city).

> the insistence that remote work is uniformly better for all people is just so exhausting

The insistence that we need to force everyone back into the office makes me quite upset.