[hallihax]

I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.

However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.

For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.

[taylodl]

My team has ad-hoc meetings all the time while working remote. We've been throwing ideas around, having design discussions, the whole shebang. Yes, the first six months were difficult - it took us a while to figure out a new way to work. But now it's been 2.5 years since we've been in the office and we've been hiring people who live several hundred miles away or more from what used to be our office. C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

[hallihax]

> C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!

[taylodl]

It's the law of averages. We're just an average, ordinary dev team producing extraordinary results because we scrutinize every aspect of how we work.

[hallihax]

We also scrutinise every aspect of how we work; it doesn't mean that there's a viable remote-only replacement for everything a team might need to do.

Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.