Changes to management: today's management and team structure may be friendly towards remote engineers and/or a distributed team, but changes to management or caused by team growth may create a situation where being remote is harder. I've been there: a fully remote team started hiring everybody from the same 2 different cities, then split in two teams where the majority of people on each team was local plus they had a few old-timers being remote.
Processes: things work great when all the process are remote-first. When you have processes that are local-first but have exceptions for remotes, things get worse. For example: one of our meetings used to be phone-only: everybody would dial in, even if they were in the office, since there was no room reserved for it. It worked great for remotes, since everybody was remote in that situation. As soon as things changed and the team was mostly concentrated in a single office, they started reserving the room for the majority of the people and then dialing through the Cisco thing so remotes could participate. It turns our a lot of the communication started using non-verbal channels such as gestures, faces, sometimes people would talk too quiet for the microphone to pickup, so the whole experience for the remotes was very downgraded, to the point they started being second class citizens in the meeting. And from that, things escalate very quickly to 'remotes are second-class employees'.
Processes: things work great when all the process are remote-first. When you have processes that are local-first but have exceptions for remotes, things get worse. For example: one of our meetings used to be phone-only: everybody would dial in, even if they were in the office, since there was no room reserved for it. It worked great for remotes, since everybody was remote in that situation. As soon as things changed and the team was mostly concentrated in a single office, they started reserving the room for the majority of the people and then dialing through the Cisco thing so remotes could participate. It turns our a lot of the communication started using non-verbal channels such as gestures, faces, sometimes people would talk too quiet for the microphone to pickup, so the whole experience for the remotes was very downgraded, to the point they started being second class citizens in the meeting. And from that, things escalate very quickly to 'remotes are second-class employees'.