Why Do We Still Commute?
I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level.<p>Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time. Easy to get siloed into your current job, while not keeping up with the rest of the company and enabling career growth. Easy to let poor communication habits turn into real problems. And when your entire company works from home, as mine did, you develop a culture of acting like there is no better choice, and the benefits of your personal flexibility at home outweigh any problems at work... causing people to not fight very hard to fix problems, and to stay in those jobs longer than they should because of how comfortable the working situation is.<p>Now, all of those things can be handled if you have personal discipline, good co-workers, and great leadership. But not all teams can truly claim those qualities. So I feel both working environments have their good and bad sides, and the choice of which situation to pursue is a question that needs to be answered with some solid contextual information about the team, the culture, and your personality to know which one is truly best for any specific individual at any specific job.