Today Facebook announced that it moving to permanent work-from-home for many employees. In the long run expect up to 50% of their workforce to be remote . This follows Shopify, Twitter, Coinbase and a bunch of other companies (almost) going all-in on remote.

How do I feel about this? Mixed emotions. Context: I’ve been a remote PM for a nearly a year now and it is hard. My job is gathering ideas, influencing stakeholders, motivating people, listening to people and a lot of people stuff . The boring mechanical bits are 100% remote ready. I don’t need to be next to you send you a email outlining our product strategy or explaining why we’re prioritising X thing . It is is the soft stuff of human connection which we can’t transmit over electronic pipes (yet). In the future with brain-machine interfaces and advanced sensors you’ll transmitting the exact feeling of a feeling but not now.

So much of communication is body language and visible behaviour - whether its an enthusiastic greeting or conveying your desperation through a jittery voice and a trembling body or staying late at the office. That just goes away . Humans are built for complex adaptive movement. And as someone who focused on building public speaking skills and honing presence, all of that goes out the window . You’re never going notice a hungover or grumpy co-worker on chat.

But not working in the office is so liberating. I’ve worked from home occasionally. I used to go to office because I love my setup there. Between a powerful desktop and two huge monitors, salads in cafeteria, chances to meet people and a library; I was good with going to office.  Then I got bored and decided to go hang with my friends in Bangalore. My time in Bangalore was A+ on productivity. My friends and everyone in house was off to their own jobs during the day (except for one unemployed friend) . This meant the house was silent and free of disturbances. The one unemployed friend had a nocturnal sleeping schedule which meant he woke up just in time for some chai pe charcha after I had worked intensely during the day . I would work my normal hours on the kitchen table with absolute focus and no one to disturb me. I’d make my own coffee when needed. Meals were either ordered for delivery or I’d walk to nearby restaurants . It was a decently comfortable schedule and a productive setup.

This experience is a decent barometer to judge remote life by. It’ll work of the time but I’d love the option of meeting in-person for 1. Important stuff 2 . Socialising bond. Most remote-only do annual/bi-annual all company offsites precisely for this purpose. I’d love a hybrid setup where we have good written culture but if we want to brainstorm or really slug it out over something, me and my co-workers have somewhere we can assemble . For small companies, it might be a co-working place, for large companies this will be the purpose of the office.

Working in the same place in a networked world felt backwards to me. Since I’ve been an analyst and product manager, my computing needs haven’t been intense . Macbook Air worked ok for me; a laptop and internet is all I needed to work. People were already abusing this by “working from home” during what were vacations or trips . So it’s good that we’re acknowledging the reality.

A lot