Remote work, five years on: what actually stuck.
March 2020 sent every studio home. Five years later the dust has settled and the verdict is clearer than the discourse suggests. Here is what stuck, what didn't, and how we now work.
In March 2020 every studio we know sent everyone home. There was no playbook, the bandwidth was wrong, and nobody believed it would last more than a month. Five years on, the dust has settled, the return-to-office mandates have hit, and the actual shape of how studios work has stabilised into something nobody quite predicted.
What stuck
- 01Async-first communication. Slack/Discord/Linear became the source of truth. Meetings are decision points, not status updates.
- 02Written-first culture. Specs, RFCs, decision docs. Teams that adopted writing-as-thinking ship better products three years later.
- 03Geographic hiring. We hire from the city our HQ is in, plus three timezones either side. Pre-Covid it was the city only.
- 04Tooling parity. Everyone has the same screen, the same chair, the same setup — at home or in the office.
- 05Video calls with no expectation of cameras. Camera-on for the meeting that matters; camera-off for the daily.
What didn't
- 01Fully remote new-engineer onboarding. We tried, it doesn't work for juniors. They need elbow-time with seniors.
- 02All-day video meetings. The pandemic-era zoom marathon is over and nobody misses it.
- 03Hot-desking. The 'come in three days a week, sit anywhere' model failed; people want their own space.
- 04'Synchronous culture, just over Zoom'. Trying to replicate the office over a webcam doesn't work — it has to genuinely become a different operating model.
How we now work
| Habit | Pre-Covid | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Standup | Daily in person | Written-only in Slack threads |
| Specs / decisions | Whiteboard + verbal | Written doc in /decisions folder |
| Hiring radius | Commute distance | Anywhere within ±3h GMT |
| Office days | 5 per week, mandatory | 2 anchor days (Tue/Thu), optional |
| Off-sites | Once a year | Quarterly, multi-timezone |
| Default to camera-on? | Yes (when on video) | Only when meeting matters |
The hiring change
- 01We now consider engineers based anywhere within ±3 hours of GMT. The talent pool roughly tripled.
- 02Salary bands are tighter — we don't 'pay London rates for London people, anywhere-rates for anywhere people'. Same band, regardless of where you're based.
- 03Client work hasn't suffered for it. If anything, deeper engagement — engineers concentrate better at home for the heads-down phases.
The honest downsides
- 01Junior development is slower. Mentorship over Slack is real but it's never quite as fast as a chair pull-up.
- 02Studio culture is harder to maintain. We work at it deliberately — without intent it would erode within a year.
- 03Hardware logistics cost more. We ship Macs, displays, chairs, lights to engineers in three countries.
- 04Time zone overlap with US clients still creates a difficult late-afternoon slot for the UK team.
The companies that survived the transition and the ones now mandating five-day RTO landed in very different places. The split tracks the same question: did leadership treat remote work as a temporary accommodation, or as a permanent operating model?
The big takeaway
The companies that survived the transition and the ones that are now mandating five-day RTO landed in very different places. The split tracks pretty cleanly with one question: did leadership treat remote work as a temporary accommodation, or as a permanent operating model? The studios that took it seriously and rebuilt their processes around it are mostly hybrid, mostly happy, and shipping better than they were in 2019. The ones who tried to run the same playbook over video calls are the ones now telling everyone to come back.
We're firmly in the first camp. The studio is healthier, the work is better, the team is happier, and the geography of hiring is wider. That's the verdict five years in.