> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help
with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
My clients are in financial services. The work requires no one onsite, they all attempt to outsource to offshore India workers who also work remotely (and it goes about as well as you would expect, ebbs and flows as the winds shift at the executive level) or use H-1B labor to "sweat the asset" as they say at one of the largest bank. It's usually the narcissism or attempting to control wages by making labor more sticky (imho). Never underestimate the tribalism, status seeking, hierarchy games, and similar Dark Triad traits in the folks who climb the corporate ladder and are in positions of power.
H1B Crackdown on Indian Workers Erodes Texas Real Estate Boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399957 - June 2026 ("Anand was on an H-1B visa, working at Citibank through an IT-staffing firm called Iris Software, often 12 to 15 hours a day. Narayanaswamy was a human resources generalist. In August she came home to find her husband crying. He’d been laid off, which meant he could lose his visa if he couldn’t find another job quickly. About a week later he died by suicide. In his final note he wrote that he feared he couldn’t compete with AI. (Iris Software didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment.")
(I'm autistic, I'm just here to do work I enjoy, I leave the politics to folks who want to play politics or think it matters, I can do this work from anywhere I have power and clear view of the sky)
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724019 - June 2026 (38 comments)
Fortune 500 bosses demanding staff RTO share 1 trait: Narcissism, research finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682333 - June 2026 (2 comments)
The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639459 - June 2026 (4 comments)
H1B Crackdown on Indian Workers Erodes Texas Real Estate Boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399957 - June 2026 ("Anand was on an H-1B visa, working at Citibank through an IT-staffing firm called Iris Software, often 12 to 15 hours a day. Narayanaswamy was a human resources generalist. In August she came home to find her husband crying. He’d been laid off, which meant he could lose his visa if he couldn’t find another job quickly. About a week later he died by suicide. In his final note he wrote that he feared he couldn’t compete with AI. (Iris Software didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment.")
(I'm autistic, I'm just here to do work I enjoy, I leave the politics to folks who want to play politics or think it matters, I can do this work from anywhere I have power and clear view of the sky)
Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149
Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
so. works for many people, but not for others
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Where am I wrong?