I worked for a mobile operator for 5 years starting in 2001. We had 20 months to bootstrap the company and get at least 3 million customers. There were no virtual operators back then. We had to have our network, our software, our everything. We were a big startup, about 3k people.
I think that the only way to pull that off is working all together in an office. Too many things to do, people to talk with, known and unknown unknowns to figure out, etc.
But a couple of years after launch, when the dust settled down? Working from home would start to be possible.
I'm self employed and working from home now, for almost 17 years. The only two things that would make me go back to an office are either I can't find a customer for a long time or somebody covers me with gold, really a lot of it.
This way of looking at remote work might be well-intentioned vis-a-vis remote work, but it's still essentially remote-hostile.
Specifically, I'm referring to the type of thinking where you think of remote work as capable of handling "business as usual" but maybe less productive than on-site and less capable of handling "crunchtime".
This type of thinking is what blows up hybrid remote/onsite companies. One day, somebody thinks it's a good idea to hire Bob remotely, while Frank, who has been with the firm for a while, has to stay on-site, to limit the scope of the "remote experiment". Now you've just given Frank a reason to be jealous of Bob, and, at the first possible opportunity, Frank is going to start putting out the message "Bob is just not pulling his weight. But what do you expect? He's remote."
A manager of a failing project with remote people is going to go: Wouldn't it be a great idea, to fly everybody in for a month, just to get through crunchtime? And now you're alienating your remote workforce, because the only thing worse than an on-site job that you sign up for, is a remote job that transforms into a "living out of hotels" job that you didn't sign up for.
The inevitable outcome is that the company blows itself up, either from the bottom-up, because you've allowed a caste system to happen, and the castes are at war with each other, or from the top-down, because some high-level manager goes "well, if on-site is more productive, why not increase the productivity of the whole company by mandating everybody to be on-site?"
I think that the only way to pull that off is working all together in an office. Too many things to do, people to talk with, known and unknown unknowns to figure out, etc.
But a couple of years after launch, when the dust settled down? Working from home would start to be possible.
I'm self employed and working from home now, for almost 17 years. The only two things that would make me go back to an office are either I can't find a customer for a long time or somebody covers me with gold, really a lot of it.