Posted on: 2025-10-29

Preface

I will skim some of the context, but in recent years, I have been in many different companies and teams with different operational models, including remote, hybrid, and in-office. In one of my experiences, the team was entirely on-site and then moved to a hybrid model. In this short article, I'll describe my current opinion about what is the most and least efficient way of working. Let's remember that I will not weigh the pros and cons of life-balance or how convenient it is to work from home, but only write in terms of the optics of how it impacts team collaboration and, thus, the team's performance. The article will have a few sub-titles that describe the team's dynamics, and for each setup, I will share my learning.

On-Site

I've been on-site my whole life, when I lived in Canada, and the same when I started my career at Microsoft in the USA. From that point on, the collaboration couldn't have gone better, and the idea of being remote or hybrid never even crossed my mind. Moving to the US, I had a great campus at Microsoft, and I enjoyed walking and talking to the PM/EM or my teammates. I bonded well with the team while keeping a standard 8 hours. In the US, my commute was always under 30 minutes. I had a mixed experience with public transportation and my car. I also had experience both with and without kids. At this point, I had no issue going to the office, and it was normal. I started having a great experience with my PM and with some of my teammates. We were having casual conversations, discussing what we liked or didn't, and even talking about potential ideas we could try to implement. I also learned more about each person's personality, which helped navigate some tricky conversations, and, overall, the non-verbal cues in many interactions made for a good in-person experience.

I was totally on-site once I joined Netflix. For 60% of my tenure, everyone was on-site. I was eating breakfast and lunch with the team, and we had meetings, side-corridor talks, 1-1s while walking, etc. It was tremendous, and Netflix offered many great perks at the office. I remember having many early-morning talks with some backend folks, and these casual conversations about the backend helped me overall. I was able to cross-team easily by walking into other teams' sections to share a larger initiative, and share time with a few people to get introduced. I had great experiences being blocked, walking to a specific team with my laptop, and having my issue fixed within the hour. The fast access and availability were very efficient and, to this day, the best development experience I ever had: people were there to let you keep going full speed and

Fully Remote Covid

I was still at Netflix when COVID struck. The dynamic was fine while a few people had a harder time being as active. Some distance occurred, and suddenly, some projects had more issues, disconnects, and, unfortunately, some problematic redundant work was done. However, because everyone was in the same situation, the experience was not that bad. I did a lot of good work, but at that time, I was more independent, as I was already well-accustomed to my projects, the folks on other teams, and how each dependency worked. Thus, my experience of being fully remote was great.

Hybrid Post-COVID

Here is where it started to slip, even in a team that knew each other. Only a quarter of people came back to the office. Lunch, side conversation, and cross-team were not the same. Not at all. People started to be more divided. Information was not flowing as well. The moral was different from my perspective. Walking to a team room wasn't the same, as you never knew if the right person was there. Same for our team: our leaders weren't always there, and some more tenured people stayed completely remote while not adjusting their communication. It was clear to me that if the same company and team that were so efficient and great were now operating in a different mode, then something was different. My hypothesis was (and remains) that fully on-site was the best for communication, team-sharing, team-bonding, and so many other qualities of teamwork. That is true for the immediate team you work with, but also for the cross-team. Fully remote wasn't that bad either, but required more effort, and is still fine, though not optimal. Hybrid was the worst.

Only One Remote

I moved on to a position where I became the only remote team member. It was the worst scenario, while very convenient. I was very diligent about sharing a lot on Slack, recording videos, commenting on documents, and participating in meetings. I had a schedule that aligned as closely as possible with my team and never did non-work during work hours. However, when the meeting ended, I was missing the side conversations. I was missing the lunch, I was missing the bonding. The experience wasn't great at all. My conclusion was that even if you do 100% effort, it's still a 50-50 relationship, and if the other side is not making extra effort, the balance is not there. I would not recommend doing it.

Hybrid with Separate location

I moved into a company with a campus in different cities: San Jose, Seattle, San Francisco, and many locations around the world. What was peculiar was that my immediate team was split with the PM in San Francisco, half the engineers in San Jose, and half in Seattle. The more tenured people in our team were in Seattle, and the platform team was mostly in San Francisco and Romania. The experience was sub-optimal. Learning about the system was fractured. When I started, someone new started in Seattle and ramped up a lot faster than I did. Also, being at the office meant always meeting with people over a remote call (like Zoom). It wasn't a great face-to-face experience, and this meeting could have been conducted entirely remotely.

Working with the platform team was challenging, as learning who to talk to and when, and bonding, were rare. Leaders were also absent during my whole tenure. I could see my immediate manager without problem; that was great since he was in San Jose with me, but otherwise, it was a ghost town. I witnessed a significant disconnect between many platform teams, who were unaware of how their engineers used the system, and many high-level leaders, who were unaware of inefficiencies in the process. Many people's culture wasn't strong in hybrid, but in the end, I saw people wasting a lot of time on their own growth, myself included.

Our team started experiencing drift between Seattle and San Jose, and cross-sharing work was becoming harder. Other instances at the company level weren't efficient, like opening a ticket to get access to Slack (after losing access), which was taking over 10 days. Something was off; in the past, companies, I could walk somewhere and get my issue fixed right away, but this hybrid experience was so distributed that everything was very slow, very slow.

My conclusion from that experience is that if you have many campuses, each should focus on something that is independent. Fully remote might work on the same timezone as a very similar one (within the US). The team in London, other parts of Europe, and India was making the flow very slow and challenging.

On-Site

I am glad I am back in an on-site position where everyone has to be working in the same room 3 days out of 5. There is still some flexibility for the 2 days, but these 3 days allow people to be together, bond, and have these side conversations. Having the same conditions and quick access to information is key to being performant.

Conclusion

Remote work with a flexible schedule is convenient. Still, it is not efficient unless everyone makes extra effort and has all the tools and processes, which I doubt are enforced outside companies that are remote-first (which I have no experience with). I am currently in the process of moving house to improve my on-site experience. A short commute helps, and having nice perks (for example, complimentary lunch or gym) also makes it easier.

Before ending, I want to clarify that when I work from home, I am very efficient: I code a lot and move forward quickly, but only because I am isolated and by myself. Teamwork has a cost, but overall, if everyone works together with clear boundaries on focus time, everyone should work as fast, whether remotely or in the office, but with the perk of having the additional context sharing, side-conversation, and natural interactions that lead to great bonding, which ease difficult talks and make everyone more patient and open to collaborating.