The world went home this week, all at once, and I have been watching it with a strange double feeling.
I have been working this way for years, and now everyone is. I thought that might feel like some kind of confirmation. It doesn't. Mostly I keep thinking about how hard a thing people are being asked to do — overnight, without any preparation, in the middle of something frightening, while home-schooling their kids at the kitchen table.
What is breaking is not the technology. The technology is fine. What is breaking is that companies are trying to reproduce an office through a camera. Eight hours of meetings, now with worse audio. A lot of energy spent on being seen at your desk rather than on the work itself.
The thing that made remote work good for me was never the location. It was that the work became the only evidence. Output over attendance. Writing things down instead of performing them. Trust given in advance, then checked against what actually shipped.
What this moment is revealing, quickly, is how many places never really knew what their people produced. They measured attendance because attendance was easy to see. Take the room away and you find out, fast, how much you actually understood about the work.
I do not think we go all the way back. Something has been seen now that is hard to unsee. But I would ask everyone discovering this to be gentle with themselves. You are not bad at remote work. You are doing remote work in a crisis, and those are not the same thing at all.