I worked from home essentially full time for 1.5-2 years. Even when I wasn't WFH full-time, everyone else in my department was.

If I am honest the biggest drawback, which took me a while toidentify, was the fact that you have absolutely no social circle. If you are a new hire in an established department where everyone is already WFH, you are not going to get to know your coworkers, your boss, anyone you work with, in any significant way. You don't realize how much you learn about the people you work with until all of a sudden you don't have any coworkers.

There were a couple of downsides that I found stemmed off of that isolation. First, I do think we're social creatures, and after school's out and we go to full-time employment, generally speaking, our social spheres contract even in a regular employment setting. When you WFH you essentially remove the "work social sphere" totally. So if you are a lonely post-college graduate wondering where to find friends or just to find someone to talk to, you no longer have work as a resource. I mean, I hate how much my coworkers talk to me and I deliberately sit off by myself, but I still would rather have the option of their company when I want/need it, than the total nothingness that I experienced working from home. Yes you have IM but IM is not a face-to-face conversation and I don't think you can build the same rapport that way. I found working from home lonely.

Also as a result I wasn't very attached to my job. I executed what I needed to but beyond that I didn't have any reason to care or get invested. Most people will agree that your coworkers make or break your job for you. Good coworkers will really get you to care about your job, I've found, at least because you don't want to disappoint them, and also because you like them, want to help out, etc. Good coworkers really are what makes a "team" feeling, I find. Also, having to work with your coworkers. Since I started working in office settings I have cried about leaving jobs, about coworkers leaving, and so on. When I quit my FT WFH job I felt absolutely nothing. There was no one I missed, nothing even really.

Another thing I experienced was that, especially if you are a new hire on an established WFH team (repeating myself I know), it's very hard to gain recognition, "be in the eyes" of management, "get your name out there," and so on. I found even if I went into work, no one else was there, so it was kind of pointless. Without helpful peers physically near me to talk to and confide in I didn't have anyone to point me towards potentially good career moves, such as "volunteer for this" or "go to this networking event." Also, unless I was IMing or emailing my boss all the time, I simply wasn't in her line of sight and she wasn't thinking about me. I think it is a lot easier to be overlooked and forgotten, especially if you haven't had the opportunity to establish yourself as a solid worker with a good reputation, when you wfh.

I think without coworkers a lot of humanity is stripped from work. It's different if you WFH once or twice a week. WFH full-time was a luxury but it was also killer.

There were other drawbacks too (like I basically never got any exercise, would wake up on weekends thinking I needed to be logged in, etc) but those are really minor in comparison to what I experienced when I was FT WFH and effectively had no coworkers.

I would never work from home full time again. I do get to do it every Friday and that's great. Sometimes I go home mid-day and finish a day from home, too. But full time, never. I can complain that my coworkers talked to me for waaaayyy too long all I want these days but I would rather have them there for rapport, advice, solidarity, support, etc, than go back to the days when everyone was just a screenname on my IM.