Remote Work Changed Me: From Office Walls to Global Freedom

Back in 2017, I interviewed for a job at a company that would later be acquired by Bosch. One of the tech leads dialed in from Africa, where he was traveling in an old Defender, a week on the road, a week of coding, repeat. To me, this was both liberating and alien. I was looking for my first “joby-job” in the corporate world, not the shiny agency life I had known before. And yet here was someone who embodied a freedom that seemed worlds apart from my expectations of how work should look.

At the time, I valued the office. Lunch with colleagues, hallway conversations, whiteboards covered in architectural sketches, and even the occasional NERF gun fight. These weren’t just perks, they were how you built culture and solved problems together. For a leader, they were also a window into people’s lives, their struggles, their joys. That mattered.

Then COVID-19 happened.

My company was technically well-prepared. Scaling remote access was as easy as adding VPN licenses, and suddenly working from home was the norm. At first, it felt like a luxury: no 45-minute traffic jams, breakfast with my partner, two extra hours a day reclaimed. But the real challenge surfaced in moments of human connection, like onboarding a new colleague who had just gone through a breakup during lockdown. Leading someone through hardship without the crutch of a coffee chat or office presence forced me to grow in new ways.

On the engineering side, remote work quickly became a non-issue. In fact, it became an advantage. With teammates across India, Germany, and the US, time zones forced us to be sharper, more thoughtful, more intentional. Communication wasn’t constant chatter, it was focused, asynchronous, and respectful. In some ways, it made us better, certainly it made us faster.

What changed for me wasn’t just the mechanics of work, it was the meaning. Work is not a place where you go. Work is the value you create.

I now thrive on a hybrid rhythm: time at home, time with clients, and the freedom to recharge elsewhere, maybe running along the Italian coast in the afternoon, maybe brewing a specialty coffee in the morning in my apartment in Bavaria. For senior, intrinsically motivated people, trust matters far more than presence. The world is smaller, and our options are bigger. Why not make use of that fact?

This is why I struggle to understand companies dragging employees back into offices by policy. The world didn’t collapse because we picked up our kids from kindergarten, or started our day a little later, or cooked lunch at home. As long as the work gets done, in quality and on time, why pretend otherwise?

If I had one piece of advice for leaders, it would be this: only hire people you trust. And then trust them. If you hire adults, treat them like adults. Give them space to own their role, to fail, to share their personal stories. Create opportunities to meet when it adds value, not because a clock says so. The future of work isn’t about stamping in and out. It’s about building cultures that value freedom, trust, and the human side of doing great work.