Remote Work
The Office Was Always a Technology — We Just Forgot
The open-plan office wasn't designed for collaboration; it was designed to make workers visible to managers who didn't trust them.
The Idea
When remote work exploded in 2020, most organisations treated it as a temporary deviation from the 'natural' way of working — as if gathering everyone in the same building were some ancient human constant, and Zoom was the strange experiment. But the office, as we know it, is a relatively recent invention, and it was shaped less by what made people productive than by what made them controllable. The real insight that remote work forces on us is this: the office was never a neutral container for work. It was a technology — a system for coordinating, surveilling, and standardising human effort. Like all technologies, it had trade-offs that became invisible once it was dominant. Spontaneous hallway conversations? Real, but overrated. Osmotic knowledge transfer? Also real, but mostly benefiting junior employees. The rest — the performative presence, the open-plan noise, the two-hour commute — was overhead that we collectively agreed to call 'work culture'. What remote work actually did wasn't remove the office. It made the office's assumptions legible. Suddenly, every meeting had to justify its existence in a calendar invite. Every 'quick check-in' became an act of conscious decision. The invisible scaffolding of co-location became visible — and in many cases, people discovered it was load-bearing in ways they hadn't expected, and decorative in ways they had. The real question for the future of work isn't 'office or home?' It's: now that we can see the technology clearly, which parts do we actually want to rebuild — and which were we better off without?
In the World
GitLab is one of the largest fully remote companies in the world — over 2,000 employees across more than 60 countries, with no headquarters. What makes them worth studying isn't that they 'make remote work work' through better video calls. It's that they redesigned the underlying assumptions entirely. At GitLab, almost nothing happens in real time. Decisions, debates, and project updates are documented in public internal threads that anyone can read, comment on, and search months later. The logic is blunt: if a decision was made in a meeting and only the people in the meeting know about it, the decision was made badly. This is what they call 'handbook-first' culture — the company handbook is a living document of over 2,000 pages, updated constantly, and treated as the source of truth over any individual's memory of a conversation. The effect is strange and clarifying. New hires at GitLab don't need to decode an invisible social layer of who talks to whom and what the unwritten rules are. The culture is, as much as possible, written down. Onboarding is faster. Institutional memory doesn't live in the heads of people who might leave. What GitLab figured out is that most office 'culture' is really just undocumented process — tribal knowledge that wastes enormous amounts of time and systematically advantages insiders. Making it explicit isn't cold or bureaucratic. It's actually more equitable. The office, it turns out, was hiding a lot of its costs in places nobody thought to look.
Why It Matters
Most people thinking about remote work are asking the wrong question. 'Are we more or less productive at home?' is a measurable but shallow inquiry — and the evidence is genuinely mixed, partly because productivity means completely different things depending on the role, the team, and what you're trying to measure. The more durable question is: what kind of work do you actually want to do, and what conditions does that work require? Some thinking needs solitude and deep time. Some work thrives on the kind of spontaneous friction that physical co-presence provides. A lot of work — more than most organisations admit — could be done asynchronously without anyone noticing. Having a clearer picture of what the office was actually doing changes how you advocate for yourself at work. It means you can push for the things that genuinely help — a quarterly team gathering for relationship-building, a quiet focus policy for deep work days — rather than accepting inherited arrangements as if they were natural laws. The office isn't coming back in its old form, and full remote isn't the default future either. What's actually happening is messier and more interesting: we're in the middle of renegotiating, from first principles, what it means to work with other people.
A Question to Ponder
Which parts of your working day exist because they're genuinely useful — and which exist because nobody ever thought to question them?
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