Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently
This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating).Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confidence (which feed into each other).