Switching to remote work after a pandemic was a reactive measure. It was a new work experience for most people. There were some good parts to it like - tremendous flexibility of time and location, no commute etc. And there were some not so good parts like - loneliness, disappearing boundaries between work and life or burnouts etc. But the world seems to be in a confused state now. Like a pendulum, we want to swing back to offices but not entirely. So companies are creating hybrid work policies.

But I think this middle ground option sucks for below reasons -

1. Kills freedom and efficiency

Remote work allows you to not stay close to the office location and work at different hours. But if we are required to come to the office even a few times a week, we will have to stay in some radius of the office location. Houses are often very expensive in office areas. We need to commute to the office which is a tremendous waste of time. We will be required to work certain hours. It will take away all the freedom that came with remote work.

2. Restricts opportunities

Remote work opened opportunities to both companies and people. Companies can hire people located anywhere around the world and people can join any company they wish to. But hybrid work will start restricting these choices again.

3. Damage culture

Remote work forces us to do things asynchronously. It is the only scalable way to do collaborative work. But if people start coming back to offices even for a few days, then people will start relying on hallway discussions or ad hoc meetings for decision making again. If you are someone working remotely or in a geographically distributed office, this will be the worst work experience. You will start feeling a huge disconnect.

In my opinion, the pros of remote work outweigh the cons. I will prefer solving the problems of remote work using technology and best practices. But if for whatever reasons, companies need employees back in office then I would prefer going back to older ways instead of coming up with a hybrid approach.