Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.

One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).

Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.

I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.

I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.

> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,

This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.

The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.

I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.

>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.

I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.

By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.

I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.

I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.

I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.

It also requires you to be a self-starter.

I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.

It’s also circumstantial.

Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.

Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.

It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.

The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.

For me it's always been the opposite: Stuck with so many people around, always talking, always things going on and draining me. No way to focus.

Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.

Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.

Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.

But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.

How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?

Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.

(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)

I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.

There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.

It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.

I absolutely detest this framing of remote vs onsite. What it really is is accommodated vs not-accommodated.

Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.

For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.

It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.

I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.

I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.

Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.

That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.

Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.

I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)

>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life

This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.

Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.

These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.

It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.

I'm glad you work remote because to be candid you sound like a miserable person to be stuck in an office with.

I agree 100%, you get paid to do your job, anything above this is charity to the shareholders/executives/managers. I work as a contractor so get paid for days I work, I've watched permanent staff who were perfect corporate bots get the boot while I stayed as I focused on the work.

and this is exactly why you will be seen as disposable and the first to go when layoffs happen.

personal relationships are very important, arguably more important that your raw performance.

Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.

Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.

They also completely fail to ask for the reasons of better well-being and then the article just starts guessing.

I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours

Its not just the time, its the energy expended.

I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.

I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.

Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.

I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.

But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.

So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.

Wait, are you saying that human contact has no bearing on one's psychological well-being? Or are you saying that I'm being deliberately obtuse?

>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back

Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.

Commuting to work for people who don't absolutely need to commute to work may be the biggest cargo cult of them all.

So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.

Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.

Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.

Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.

For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.

Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.

There's a mall near my house that has a food hall that has become an informal co-working space. At one point, the coffee shop had a coffee day pass.

Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there.

Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing

Did you ever consider downsizing or renting to be closer to work? I can’t imagine choosing to commute that far every day.

Unfortunately a lot of RTO advocates need to learn this.

If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.

> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.

IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.

Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.

About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.

And also likely the highest concentration of workers working after 9PM or before 6AM.

I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.

Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.

Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.

I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.

If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.

And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.

Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.

There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.

Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to

You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.

That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.

Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.

When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.

For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.

Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy.

The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3

Ikigai:

https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-bein...

Also, isn't the healthcare industry thriving? Layoffs might be less of a worry.

I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.

Many companies that are offering remote work knowingly provide lower salaries. And many people agree because added flexibility has a price too.

This is a survey of 20,000 health care workers in one organization. I doubt that that many of them are senior.

Proving a causal link between being remote not having to commute is easy.