opinion: in-office is good, remote is great, hybrid is hell
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opinion: in-office is good, remote is great, hybrid is hell (8min read)<br>Most knowledge workers are in hybrid teams, the setup most likely to desync. Notes from the remote trenches.
Mihnea<br>Aug 03, 2026
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Odds are…<br>… most projects you’ll work on will be hybrid. This is, in my opinion, the worst type of team distribution you can have.<br>There are a few reasons I’ve seen teams shift from in-office to hybrid, including, but not limited to:<br>New hires found in different locations than where the office is
A team member moves due to personal reasons
Team members want to have a few days working from home
Team members want to travel and work from another country for a couple of weeks
A pandemic
For a while now, I’ve wanted to dissect my thoughts on team distributions and their challenges and see what others might pick apart in my ideas. I’ll start by explaining my experience in each different team setup, the problems I saw with hybrid teams (where some people work in the office and some work remotely), then propose my ideas to improve collaboration , along with how these proposals panned out for me. In the end, I’ll add some data , either to show the reader how prevalent this problem is or to convince myself that it’s a problem worth writing an article about.
1. My experience in each team setup
In 2013, I started working in IT, and I’ve worked in teams which were:<br>1.1. In-office team , with the client remote
The typical consultancy team setup, in which the team can communicate freely, and the client gets the end product.<br>As some of us dinosaurs remember it, the pre-COVID days.<br>Work got shipped, coffee was drunk, jokes were had, the open office was noisy. Then the client heard about the work we were doing every day in dailies and saw it come together (or come apart) every 2 weeks in sprint change ceremonies.<br>Simpler times, when clocking out of the building meant a clearer mental 🧠 separation from work. No extra line of code at 23:17 🌙 to get the task done by tomorrow.
1.2. Hybrid team - part of the team remote, part in office
Situation 1: Pre-COVID, for a while, a few of our colleagues went remote.<br>It became noticeable that they were out of the loop with some technical decisions. Small talk in the office has a way of turning into work-related chat, which turns into feature proposals, which are best shaped when all relevant people weigh in. And those relevant people were sometimes one or two of the remote colleagues.<br>We’d forget to inform them. Not out of ill intent, but due to human error.
Two colleagues at the office coffee machine decide to rewrite the export as async; meanwhile, the remote developer, unaware, is happily finishing the export UI before her holiday<br>You could see the moment they’d realize it, days later, during a call. It wasn’t happiness. It was a small frustration at being left out. And small frustrations compound.<br>Another effect was in a client meeting, where the client caught the team out of sync. The optics of that happening aren’t exactly professional.
Working as a freelancer during 2020-2024, I was mostly part of a remote team, and the end client occasionally had team members in the office. My roles included developer, software architect, and team lead.<br>It was an eye-opening experience to see how much information is filtered out in the office before it reaches remote team members.
Situation 2: On a project, while working remotely as a team lead or software architect, a colleague and an engineering manager discussed a recent bug and performance issue over coffee.<br>Although I found out about this by asking about recent decisions at the next daily or in our 1:1s, I noticed other remote team members were also missing out on decisions that affected them.<br>I felt the frustration of being left out. And with it, I wondered “what point is there in proposing improvements, if they’re leaving me out of important decisions?”. I clarified it with the engineering manager, and pointed out that his behavior was probably happening in other teams as well, and other team leads probably feel a similar frustration.<br>Making a decision today without notifying one or more affected colleagues can snowball into diminishing project involvement.
Situation 3: We had a team setup where a few colleagues worked remotely, and a few worked in an office from another location.
Now, we remote colleagues were more recent team additions, so the people who shared an office knew each other better, had more drinks together, and had more chances to talk.<br>When things spiraled on a project, and last-minute requests started piling up, we needed a clear, swift line of communication to understand what on Earth was going on.<br>A couple of people in the office, as we would later discover, thought it would be easier to just do it themselves. They formed a sort of “Black Ops” team, outside the official project team, uninvolved in any...