But in all the jobs I've done there is a gradual erosion of communication with in-office teams which can only be remedied by regular office visits.
Not sure what I can do to remedy this; office visits are hard (the office is in a different country), Slack ends up being noise, and emails, well who has time for emails? The only thing that seems to help is regular video calls; which is time consuming.
I remember that the chap who runs Automattic uses P2 (a Wordpress theme) to communicate with his team; I've tried to use the corporate Confluence/Jira in the same way but it never seems to take hold.
Since I don't work for a company per-se, everyday of the week I go to a different place to work -- libraries, cafes, and coworking spaces. Occasionally I meet with a friend who has the ability to work remotely -- we work together at cafes with wifi. Luckily, he's a programmer and we can share ideas like this article suggests.
At a regular office your forced to be with certain coworkers regardless of how valuable their ideas might be to you, or how pleasant they are to be around. I feel fortunate to be a part of the remote workforce in this way and feel it provides worthwhile benefits over the traditional workplace.
Also sometimes it takes a while to get to know people and you don't necessarily know ahead of time who that will be. Saying that I've had maybe one friend who I would still speak to 5 years after leaving a company.
As for the people, that is true but can be achieved while working from home. It certainly takes more effort but by meeting people for lunch several times a week and meeting others in the evening you can be as social.
One aspect he doesn't mention is the commute. For many of us, that's easily 1 hour a day that you get back to use it otherwise (e.g. to meet friends).
I don't see myself as being particularly more productive at home. I charge by the hour and so financially it doesn't make sense to commute and pay for an office, but for anyone who's getting a fixed wage I think the commuting benefits can be over stated. The main gain is in flexibility.
IMO the main disadvantages of working from an office can be alleviated by just working fewer hours - unfortunately companies are not very fond of that (it's almost impossible to find a job as a programmer for less than 40h/week).
My optimal work situation would be a commute of up to half an hour (15 minutes in each direction) and working 9am to 4pm.
I certainly agree to that but as you say, this is hard to get. A short commute is probably better than no commute (to prime your brain for the different environment) but most service sector jobs focus on large cities (since few people appear to be willing to move to the country side).
The only people I knew were my parter and her mother who we were living with. The other in-laws lived close by but that was it. Effectively I've made zero friends here, certainly no-one who I'd be going for a beer with. Two years ago we moved to live on our own with the child we've had since moving here.
I have the daily standups with work but apart from that there's relatively little communication with my work. I do work with good people so it makes working remotely as easy as it can be.
There's been various ups and downs in productivity, a crash is down to 90 billable hours in a month with an upper value of 190 billable hours.
One of the hard aspects is that the flexibility of the hours makes it unclear for your partner when you're working. When an 3rd party decides what hours your working, i.e. a company then you both know when you'll be home and when not, so there's no room for argument. This is similar to when I finally decided to put a TomTom in the car. Before then car journeys could be a source for arguments because you have to plan ahead and that puts extra burden on both. Having that 3rd party to blame takes the stress out.
I go to a cafe pretty much every morning now, I living in a town of about 30,000 people but there's not a single remote tech worker here that I've ever seen in a cafe. I've tried the odd co-working space and got semi-settled in one, but the commuting time plus the cost of it wasn't worth it. It's just as lonely being surrounded by people you don't know as it is working from home.
I'm finally going to stop working remotely and work at a company in Belgium in October. I'm very intrigued as to how it will work out.
Remote work might seem great in the first few months but I eventually miss the office interaction.
Toddlers and partners and family members don't apply to everyone.
