Over the past 5 or 6 years I&#x27;ve gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team and, most recently, to working from an open plan office every day.<p>And I have to grudgingly admit something: The people who are trying to dial back on the working from home have a point. I maintain that I absolutely work harder and am less distracted when I&#x27;m working from home, and by a pretty darn appreciable margin at that. If we&#x27;re only considering me in isolation then my opinion on the subject has not wavered. But over the past few years I&#x27;ve come to see the forest for the trees a bit more, and I&#x27;m realizing that while all the individual components of a distributed team might be higher-performing, the <i>overall</i> system wasn&#x27;t running very efficiently. A lot of time was lost to redundant efforts, efforts at cross purposes with each other, stuff like that.<p>I&#x27;m not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I still think there is a place for working from home and working remotely. But I&#x27;m also prepared to concede that it&#x27;s not all kittens and lollipops, and that there are valid reasons why a company might decide that co-location better suits its needs.<p>Full disclosure: I still ended up leaving my job over it. Among other reasons (none of which were really about the office itself), that daily commute would have eventually ground my sanity into nothingness.