Posted on: June 9, 2025
The morning after a grueling flight back from Poland, I’m standing in the kitchen watching the coffee drip. I’ve logged too many hours in airports over the past week, all for an onsite workshop that could have been an email—except it couldn’t. Face to face, we solved in one week what two months of video calls hadn’t even framed correctly.
That trip lodged a question under my skin: Where does work actually happen now?
In 2020, the world hit Ctrl Alt Delete. Garages became dev stations, and cats acquired careers in pair programming. For a while it felt like a silent revolution: output held steady, commute vanished, everyone wore victory hoodies on Zoom.
Then the market flooded with engineers, boards panicked, and the old reflex kicked in—badge in or bail out. Gartner’s January 2024 pulse says a third of senior techies would rather walk than badge five days a week. I ran the same pulse with my crew in ’23. Same answer, different coffee mugs.
Individual contributors fall into flow like free divers. Their enemy is interruption. Commute steals hours, open offices steal focus, and the only water cooler they need is the kettle next to VS Code.
Managers (hi, that’s me) traffic in signal—tone of voice, side eye, that half shrug that means this API is about to explode. Non verbal cues turn conversations into acceleration lanes. Strip them away and leadership feels like steering with oven mitts.
I’ve lived both realities. In COVID’s deepest winter I tried to migrate an entire project portfolio using nothing but mosaic grids of faces from Poland, Mexico, and India. Picture a conductor with one hand, one leg, and the orchestra on dial up. It worked—slowly. When we finally met on site, velocity spiked so hard the burn down looked Photoshopped.
The ghost in this debate is trust. Let people own outcomes and the address line in their calendar matters less. Distrust them and no amount of cubicles will save delivery.
In 2013 I moved from Russia to the U.S. and kept leading the same offshore team. Within weeks I felt the rapport leak away like air from a balloon. Emojis can’t replace a hallway grin. I rebuilt the rhythm—more 1 on 1s, quarterly on sites—but I learned charisma barely flies across an ocean.
I bet on hybrid. Remote for the deep dives, in person for the lightning strikes. Enough shoulder rubs to charge the trust battery, enough freedom to keep the flow state sacred.
But that’s my story. What’s yours? Was your best code written in bunny slippers or under fluorescent buzz? Ping me; I’m still deciding where to place my next coffee mug.
Written by Ilya Komakhin