I occasionally worked from home in 1998. The biggest impediment was network speed -- at work we had 10mbps and sometimes even 100mpbs. But at home all we had was dail up or if you were really lucky, DSL, which was 0.384mbps, so 30 times slower, and also latency was a lot higher.

So you were very limited in what you could do. Mostly it was just email and remote access ssh with tmux, where you sometimes had to deal with really high latency.

It only happened in this instance because the person in question had a newborn baby and I guess maternal leave wasn't a thing at Pixar back then.