For those of you who have watched Sex and the City, you probably deeply envied Carrie’s luxurious lifestyle – her incessant shopping, endless brunches and lavish parties, her glamorous friend group and you probably thought her job as a columnist was the lazy writer’s dream.

Perhaps your first thought was, “Wow, it must be exhilarating to work from a coffee shop after hours of meeting successful people in trendy bars and gossip all day.”.

Well, maybe you’re right –  or you would be in theory!

After more than two years of working exclusively remotely for several companies, I want to share my personal ups and downs of working remotely and, more importantly – my hot takes on remote working. It’s definitely not a black-and-white matter, and working remotely has taught me a lot about the workplace in general and how remote working requires a massive amount of organization, not only from the employee but also from the employer.

So, without any further rambling from me – here are my spicy opinions. Feel free to debate them in the comments!

Remote work is often used as a way to hide employers’ poor management skills.

I know – this is a very abrasive statement, but the truth can be abrasive sometimes. In a few companies I worked for, I realized that remote work was viewed as a cop-out for bad management. 

 If you’re not good at managing employees, you better keep them at arm’s length. That’s what a few of my previous employers think.

I remember one of my employers being unable to make small talk over Zoom calls and admitting openly that hiring a remote workforce allowed him to tend to other matters and that he didn’t want to deal with employees too much. 

As honest as this statement sounded, I was confused by it. Once management skills were acquired, it would be far easier to organize a remote workspace. It is crucial for employers to learn how to manage people efficiently, regardless of the setting. This particular employer also had a bad habit of trying to hire the cheapest workers. I remember texting this employer to ask him if I should attend a meeting (which I figured would be a waste of my working hours – I turned out to be right.)He responded that he would hire a cheaper South Asian worker if he didn’t want me to attend meetings.

Remote workers are often expected to mind-read.

In my experience working remotely, there were a few instances where the aforementioned poorly-trained managers would not be able to explain what they expected from me. 

This can cause a lot of stress for employees and employers when the manager just throws out a task on a Zoom call or via a Whatsapp text without specifying if they expect the task to be performed a certain way.

Regardless of experience, every employee deserves clear instructions in order to perform their tasks as best as possible.

One of my managers I worked for would get very passive-aggressive when I wouldn’t complete a task to her liking and, even after mentioning that I had just started working with the company and required more guidance in terms of task execution if she wanted me to perform it to her standards, she would still get frustrated at me for not magically reading her mind and understanding exactly what she wanted. 

I had to leave this job after a month of starting as her management style wasn’t conducive to a positive working relationship.

A remote worker needs to schedule breaks, and that can be awesome.

Although I am flagging the bad and the ugly, there is something good about remote working: Since most managers don’t bother scheduling breaks for their employees, then you, as a remote worker, can choose when and where you take these breaks. If that means taking a slightly longer lunch break to walk your dog, then so be it!

Many of my remote employers were very understanding when I asked them if I could stop working slightly earlier to attend a medical appointment. 

In fact, I had a colleague from an in-person job quit the organization because our boss (who worked remote!) wouldn’t allow her to work hybrid and attend some important medical appointments.

Remote employers can keep their staff happy if they allow a certain level of flexibility.

No office politics!

Not having to deal with listening to your colleagues’ “exciting” weekend where they tripped over a pebble after getting wasted is a massive perk. It can become exhausting to pretend you care in order to form work alliances and advance your career. Remote jobs allow you to avoid the whole problem of office politics to a certain extent. 

In one of my in-person jobs, I was often confronted with very unsettling office chit-chat, such as one of my colleagues making fun of French people and mocking their accents (I’m half French, but people can’t really tell because I don’t sound French when I speak English). Although I can take a joke, I sometimes wondered if they were doing this to mock me, and it became really awkward just laughing the whole thing off.

Ridiculous expectations are piled on remote workers.

Many studies show that remote workers tend to be more productive than their in-office counterparts. It often feels like employers take advantage of remote employees and assume they do nothing all day, so they pile on tasks.

Along with a multitude of tasks, many employers become micro-managers and require full transparency when it comes to how employees make use of their working hours.

During my time with my manager, who would expect me to mind-read, I remember her asking me to start filling out a timesheet that required me to detail exactly what I was doing during every hour of my working day. It was a nightmare filling this timesheet because I had a choice between wasting a lot of time explaining what I did in detail or only writing a line or two, which didn’t reflect the complexity of the task and made me look like a slacker.

Burn out and bullshit jobs.

Remote jobs are not exempt from being bullshit jobs that cause burn out. Coined by the anthropologist David Graeber, the term” bullshit jobs” describes all types of absolutely pointless jobs that can end up harming psychologically the workers who do them. I can affirm that I’ve already had a few of those – particularly in marketing, where I produce nothing but cool content that ends up being forgotten. 

I’m in my twenties and working in remote jobs where half of the meetings are meaningless yet tedious, where the tasks don’t require my creativity, expertise, or input, and where I can spend a day alone in my room seeing no one and where my bosses expect me to “just use AI” had a severe impact on my mental health.

So far, I’ve had two really good remote jobs that didn’t feel pointless because my employers cared about me and my abilities. However, I would recommend against depending on your employers’ appreciation. When you live in a state where your happiness at work is dependent on external validation, your work life can easily become miserable because dependence on someone who does not validate you really drains your energy and can make you procrastinate and feel like a failure.

You might be wondering why I didn’t hang onto these two wonderful remote jobs. Once again, remote work is often offered by companies that do not have the means to pay for an office. And you guessed it – Since I worked mainly in marketing, a lot of companies saw my work as an extra, so I was out the door from the second company finances were in trouble. 

If you think you’re going to travel around the world, you’re deluding yourself.

There are so many ads on Instagram promoting remote work as a way to achieve a great life-work balance.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In my experience, traveling whilst working was an okay-ish experience. You realistically can’t be working and lounging on the beach; it’s pretty incompatible. 

You actually need to think of the following things: 

–       Do I have a quiet place in case my boss calls?

–       Am I really going to produce the amount of work expected from me if I’m traveling?

–       Is it realistic to think that I can travel during the daytime and work at night, or will I end up burnt out or just not do the work?

–       Is it worth spending money to travel if all my days are consumed by work?

–       Do I have a socket to plug in my computer?

–       What happens if I have Wi-Fi issues? Do I have a backup?

The only people that I know who can truly enjoy travelling as remote workers are influencers who exclusively live off their brands and social media and part-time workers who don’t need to work more than 1-3 hours a day.

My boyfriend is one of these lucky people who essentially works for himself and doesn’t need to pretend he is at his home office or to pick up calls all day. At one point, he convinced me to go visit a castle with him and promised me that I could sit down for one of my meetings at the castle’s coffee shop, where there would be Wi-Fi. But the Wi-Fi was lagging, and we ended up feeling very stressed because the meeting lasted more than it usually does, and I had to go home and make up for the hours I spent visiting the castle.

Overall, I wouldn’t advise against remote work – I think it’s a great way to recover from intense burn-out caused by demanding in-person jobs, and if you have the right management, it can be very fulfilling. Just remember that once you work remotely, you are very dependent on external factors to feel satisfaction at work.

I’ve come to realize that it might be time for me to quit my bullshit remote jobs and maybe step into in-person jobs where there are less rigid KPIs, more budget, and less need for toxic office politics.

Sure, I will face new challenges, such as rush hours, dealing with colleagues, bosses, and clients face-to-face, less time to throw in a wash. But I will also be able to meet lots of new people, enjoy coffee breaks with my new colleagues, and get opportunities I wouldn’t usually get.

This was written by our contributing writer, Suzanne Latre.