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Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds

epolanski
153 replies
7h18m

The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.

The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.

I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.

For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.

Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.

At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.

intended
100 replies
6h51m

I would add one major change that the work from home experiment has achieved - its made the opportunity cost of the work commute clear. This is a time cost paid for by the worker.

As you stated, this is variable.

If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.

If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.

Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.

Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.

If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.

vidarh
31 replies
5h44m

During my last job change I gave concrete numbers to recruiters on what getting me into an office would cost.

In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.

hospitalJail
27 replies
5h21m

For me it was:

Company A is 2.5 hours of drive time

Company B is remote

Pay is the same.

lol I imagine that Company A will find some sucker, but instead of getting A+ workers that can realize company B> company A, they are going to get the leftover workers, their second choice. To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.

miroljub
21 replies
5h14m

Why call people suckers? Maybe they don't mind commuting? Maybe their commute is only 15 minutes, and not 2.5 hours?

To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.

Even if they were "leftovers", their value to the company they know in and out after 10 to 20 years and their productivity skyrockets compared to the A+ rock stars that left the company after one year.

oneplane
20 replies
4h30m

I think they would be referred to as 'suckers' because they are spending time for their employer for which they are not compensated in that scenario (two options, both pay the same, but one requires you to sacrifice significant portions of your day for no compensation).

pigbearpig
11 replies
4h6m

Bill might like a long commute as much as Gladys likes to work from home. Hard to call Bill a sucker in that case.

bdw5204
7 replies
3h55m

The only reason I can imagine that somebody would genuinely like a long commute would be if they hate their home life and are trying to escape from it. They'd probably be better off just getting a divorce instead.

coldpie
4 replies
3h23m

My commute is about 40 minutes each way by bus, plus a 5 minute walk on both ends. I love it. I get outdoors for a short walk four times a day, I read books and magazines on the bus, see what's being built or new businesses opening around town, sometimes I get to meet neighbors and other commuters, or help out random strangers with directions or whatever. My commute to work is definitely a benefit to my life.

ProjectArcturis
1 replies
2h47m

If you had a remote job, would you take a 40-minute round-trip bus ride twice a day just for the enjoyment of it?

coldpie
0 replies
2h39m

No.

mikrl
0 replies
1h43m

During the summer when I work from home I take a 20 minute walk at 8:30 (and water my tomatoes) and a 20 minute walk at 12:00 before settling back into my home office with lunch.

If I’m feeling up to it, I get another 30-40 minute walk in once it cools off in the evening.

I don’t mind driving in during the winter though, because then I don’t have to pay to heat my house (beyond 15C for the cat) for the day.

hospitalJail
0 replies
26m

The human brain is incredible at rationalization.

toast0
0 replies
2h33m

I had a bike / ferry / bike commute a couple days a week for a while. It was nice to get that exercise in, and I enjoy ferry rides too.

Retric
0 replies
3h21m

Reading on a long buss/train ride can be inherently pleasant. Similarly not all car commutes are stuck alone in traffic, I rather enjoyed commuting with my dad.

oneplane
1 replies
3h26m

Gladys can drive around for hours at will, while Bill has no choice. Bill is still a sucker.

sanderjd
0 replies
2h56m

There can actually be significant value to limiting optionality. This is the solution to "the paradox of choice"; sometimes it's actually better to have fewer choices!

I find this very unintuitive and even mentally rebel at the idea when I think about it, but I still think it's true.

But for example, consider three scenarios:

1. Work from home, with a consistent habit of going on a ten minute walk and reading for half an hour before and after work. 2. Commute with a ten minute walk and half hour train ride, with a consistent habit of reading on the train. 3. Same as (1), but family responsibilities and other distractions end the moment work begins and begin the moment work ends. 4. Same as (2), but spend the train ride doom scrolling.

For me (1) is best but also unlikely because there are too many other "choices" of what to do before and after work, so in practice I end up doing (3).

But option (2) of commuting by train would actually be better than (3) despite having less optionality! I would have more wind-up and -down time each day, and get more reading done.

But the risk of option (2) is that there is still too much optionality; instead of reading, I could scroll crap on my phone. Removing that optionality somehow - by getting a dumb phone or some other solution to keep myself from this bad habit - would be another improvement.

Clearly it would be better to make better choices without limiting options, but human nature being what it is, it often turns out better in practice to not have the other options at all.

jimmydddd
0 replies
3h44m

I've been WFH for 15 years and love it. My wife has been WFH for 3 years. While I do prefer WFH, I think there were benefits to us being apart during the work day and then catching up at dinner/evening. There are some downsides to being together 24/7, even in a good relationship.

pc86
6 replies
3h38m

15 minutes is not significant.

zer0tonin
5 replies
3h18m

15 * 2 minutes a day 5 times a week is 100h+ by the end of the year

pc86
1 replies
2h16m

It's 1.4% of the year (assuming that 130 hours a year is correct I didn't check it). That's less than two ounces out of a gallon of liquid or less than half a centimeter out of a foot.

In what other things is 1.4% considered "significant?"

dgfitz
0 replies
1h12m

Taxes jump to mind. COL adjustments vs inflation for the past few years also comes to mind. Beating some measurable world record by 1.4% is probably a big deal. I'm sure there are more examples if you look for them.

miroljub
1 replies
1h40m

You can read 10 books during that time. It's not like you need to sit there, do nothing and intensively hate your life 2 * 15 minutes a day.

rkuodys
0 replies
27m

Or, you know, it's 15min exercise which you need just the same :)

Novosell
0 replies
2h19m

130h a year, assuming you work 5 days every week and that every commute is exactly 15min.

Retric
0 replies
3h27m

You negotiate compensation before accepting the job and generally have the option to move.

If anything it’s people failing to consider commute times when looking for work that’s the issue not company’s requirements. Going they will pay me 10k more per year but I’ll spend X more hours a week commuting is effectively being paid to commute.

neverrroot
2 replies
3h3m

Wow, just wow. Calling someone a sucker for taking a job, without considering anything else.

What about the top of the crop who live around the corner and prefer office over WFH for a clear separation between work and personal life?

justapassenger
1 replies
2h25m

Tech is full of people like OP. You got good paying job (because profession is hot) so you’re obviously smarter than everyone else, and your way of thinking and living is only right one.

tveyben
0 replies
1h40m

‘Smarter’ or just ‘different’…?

DiggyJohnson
1 replies
3h10m

Would I be a sucker if I have a 12 minute commute and prefer going into the office with my teammates?

hospitalJail
0 replies
27m

No one lives 12 minutes away from this place. They picked the 'Ohio' of our state to build their HQ. Cheap land.

pawelwentpawel
2 replies
3h9m

Once you add those numbers, the total is usually insane. While I do miss being in the office sometimes (mostly for the social life), it's just too expensive for me as a worker right now. It's not just the time spent on commute, it's also the money that you have to spend to stay within a commutable distance from the office.

Also, my profession is being a Software Engineer, not a train passenger.

I made a calculator for this a while ago: https://flat.social/blog/get-a-remote-team-back-in-the-offic... (scroll a bit down for the inputs).

wharvle
0 replies
33m

Yep, I prefer the office.

... but not even close to enough to car-commute more than about 10 minutes to it, given the option. That's roughly the cut-off. Under 1.5 bikeable miles (that's ideal!) or maybe 5 miles by car.

And to get that short a commute, I'd need all kinds of other compromises in most cities. Worse schools, more expensive and smaller housing.

Is my preference for the office worth hundreds of hours a year lost commuting, thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, and all the extra micromorts from the commute? LOL. LMFAO. God no, it's not even close. No typical commute is a low enough cost that I'd pay it to be in the office. It's way off.

So, though I do in fact prefer working in the office... nah.

dgfitz
0 replies
1h20m

You spend around 8 hours on travel weekly which amounts to around 45 days of full-time work per year and will sum up to 450 days of full-time work (3600 hours) over 10 years. It's 4 years of full-time work days (9000 hours!) over 25 years.

Kind of wish I hadn't looked... :(

bargle0
15 replies
4h55m

IMO, an hour spent commuting is an hour stolen from one’s children.

brvsft
8 replies
4h45m

I am starting to use coworking spaces now because WFH has something of a toll on my family, primarily because kids are loud, and it can be frustrating to work while your loud kid is screaming in the next room without enough of a sound barrier to prevent you from hearing it. I'm not angry at my child, but sometimes I get upset with my wife for not preventing this, or for telling me it's not that loud when it is impossible to escape the noise.

(And when they're not being loud, they're being cute, and it's a tempting and easy distraction to go spend some time with them in the middle of a work day.)

In this sort of dynamic, I see working at an office as a fairly healthy option. I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father), but I'm definitely more productive and less stressed out working from an office.

davely
2 replies
3h34m

I agree with this to an extent. Our kiddos are old enough to be in school. But if someone is home sick, I have to take the day off because it’s hard to get anything done.

A reply to you mentioned noise-canceling headphones. That doesn’t work for me, because the kids want to engage and play with the parents when they’re at home. It’s not just a matter of noise.

That said! I still agree with OP’s sentiment. I find that I’m much more relaxed without having to worry about the commute. More time to help the kids get ready and just enjoy the moment. More time to walk them to school.

Before, I would be a ball of stress trying to get people out the door in the morning so I could catch one of only two buses that could take me across the bay to work.

Same thing in the evenings. More time to pick them up, walk home, take serendipitous side adventures and help foster their curiosity. I love it.

sanderjd
0 replies
2h52m

Yep, I strongly dislike working from home on days that the kids are home. But I also highly value the flexibility.

Novosell
0 replies
2h14m

In Sweden, you have legally mandated days to take off specifically for kid related reasons, such as illness, which is quite neat :)

BeetleB
1 replies
2h34m

I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father)

Not much of an outlier.

hnbad
0 replies
55m

In this economy? Maybe not in your income bracket.

ssijak
0 replies
3h5m

I've bought 28sqm apartment to be my office, few mins by foot from our apartment when the kid arrived. It is just better to split work hours and family hours better at that point. Better for everybody. If the main apartment/house is big enough I would not have felt the need to do it probably.

I would still not accept working from office jobs though.

caskstrength
0 replies
2h24m

What is your office like? The ones I've had dubious honor to work in is like you describe, but with dozens of noisy adult children in the same room with me, not the next one.

2024throwaway
0 replies
4h35m

Noise cancelling head phones and some soft music cuts out any kid noise completely for me.

pc86
2 replies
3h35m

Hyperbole and language like this is exactly why it's so hard to have this debate in any rational way. The onsite crowd says that all their WFH colleagues are playing video games and doing laundry all day while the WFH crowd says employers are stealing from their employees' children.

michaelmrose
1 replies
1h51m

I don't think the WFH crowd minds others going into the office. The pro onsite crowd on the other hand wants others forced into the office because their choice is unsupportable if people are given a free choice.

98% of workers want to work remote at least some of the time 65% report wanting to work remote all of the time.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti...

If 1/3 of your workforce meets 2 days a week your average utilization is about 14%. The logical conclusion is a ghost town that goes away as soon as your employer cuts the building off like a diseased hand.

zeroclicks
0 replies
1h44m

If 1/3 of your workforce meets 2 days a week your average utilization is about 14%

That's a good point. All that fancy real estate and coffee machines start to look like a wasted investment when they're used 14% of the time.

sanderjd
0 replies
2h54m

Is this also true of an hour spent winding up or down by going on a walk or reading a book or some other adult hobby?

Personally, I don't believe I must either be working or spending time with my children every moment they are awake. I'm a person too, not just a worker and parent, and need to have my own time.

s1artibartfast
0 replies
2h1m

Wait until you hear about construction and physical labor jobs. All run by child abusers.

agent281
0 replies
2h14m

At my last job, my manager was being flown in every week. He was in the office for three days a week and stayed at a hotel. His kids were apparently furious. The company was really committed to being in the office, but kept hiring people from different cities. It felt very destructive.

nine_k
13 replies
2h46m

BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.

rcbdev
7 replies
2h36m

Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally.

RestlessMind
6 replies
2h21m

You need to get out of your bubble. After having traveled to more than 60 countries on all the continents (except Antarctica), I can assure you that a majority of humans do not have good reliable public transport. It is a luxury that only some parts of the world have.

Just as an example, right now I am in an Indian city where there is some minimal public transport but a majority of people need their own vehicle to commute for most of their journeys. And it is not an unusual scenario for India, which contains more population than Europe and North America combined.

rcbdev
1 replies
2h1m

Why would you think comparing the developing world with the USA makes in any way sense - do you actually think the US is at the developmental level of India?

When comparing similarly wealthy countries the US is absolutely an outlier in this.

RestlessMind
0 replies
3m

Why would you think comparing the developing world with the USA makes in any way sense

Because you said - "Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally." "Globally" implies the entire world. Now why are you moving the goalposts? If you wanted to confine the discussion to the developed world, just call out US being an outlier in the developed world.

hwillis
1 replies
2h4m

You're being silly. The majority of the world also doesn't have access to airplanes, but that doesn't mean they don't work. OP is certainly not in the ridiculous bubble you're describing.

RestlessMind
0 replies
2m

OP's words: "Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally."

I don't think OP understands the meaning of the word globally

genman
1 replies
1h37m

I do not think that it is valid to compare a developing country that can't provide even proper sanitation to US.

We can compare US to Japan, to Europe, perhaps to some parts of China but certainly not to India - it would be too much apples to cucumbers comparison.

RestlessMind
0 replies
1m

I agree. Then let's say "developed world". Saying US is a global outlier is silly when much of the globe is underdeveloped.

lacrimacida
1 replies
2h13m

I enjoy my commute as well but no amount of justifiying it changes the fact I’d be much better off with either a shorter commute or none whatsoever by going fully remote. I’d even be okay with hybrid. Wasted time on commute ads up to a minilifetime that could be used in different ways

hosh
0 replies
1h3m

And then there are the people who want to visit family far away from their home and still be able to work. That’s enabled by remote work.

genman
1 replies
1h55m

It depends. In my case the commute is a (seriously) bumpy bus ride that takes 2-3 times more than by car (the bus has stops and it takes a longer route and I have to change the bus at least once, that adds extra latency). Fortunately the bus is relatively empty in my stop so I don't have to stand.

This means that I couldn't read anything. Shaking of the bus also gives me time to time a mild headache. Now if the ride was smoother (like a train or a tram) and I still could sit and read then indeed I would agree with you.

Fortunately I don't have to commute very often so I can tolerate this to a degree but if I had to commute every day then it would add considerable extra strain into my life.

Normally the day should be divided into 3 equal parts: 1 sleep time, 2 work time, 3 personal time.

Commute time effectively steals from either personal time or from sleep time and this comes on top of getting ready for work that is also a major waste of time in the mornings.

flurdy
0 replies
1h6m

When for many years I had a long commute into London I appreciated I was lucky that it was on a train line without any train changes required. So that was a calm productive "me time" on the train for over an hour each way. Usually do some work on my laptop, some hacking on hobby apps, some film watching etc. Also a lot of snoozing.

But I also self-selected roles closer to the end station in London so the commute at the other end was short-ish.

Whenever I had to do any other commute: by car, bus, multiple changes, etc it was always a grind and shortlived.

However, I was able to stop even the not-so-bad commute long before COVID as I wanted to be at home when the kids came back from school as they are only young once and briefly so. Though I miss the "me-time".

mlrtime
9 replies
6h2m

I definitely agree here. For most of my career I was fortunate enough to not have a "real" commute. at most a 20 min walk to the office. The worse commute is when it was raining or snowing.

The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.

Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.

I wonder if others are in the same situation.

jen20
7 replies
5h18m

I wouldn’t call 2.5% of the day (including night) nothing. 20 minutes is way past the upper bound of a daily commute I would consider reasonable!

tomoyoirl
4 replies
5h0m

I wouldn’t call it nothing either. I’d call it “actually getting a decent amount of exercise,” something many struggle with.

jen20
3 replies
4h50m

That sounds like a self-discipline problem.

lumb63
2 replies
3h55m

What’s wrong with incorporating exercise into one’s lifestyle, without dedicated exercise time? It’s convenient and sustainable. Sure, it’s not as good as dedicated exercise time in terms of the adaptations one would get, but it’s much better than the adaptations they’d get on their couch.

jen20
1 replies
3h53m

Nothing is wrong with that - it's the issue of attempting to impose it on others which is objectionable.

justneedaname
0 replies
2h53m

point me to where they tried to "impose" this on others...

wegfawefgawefg
0 replies
2h59m

People think youre a pussy thats why you got downvoted. but I agree with your spirit though. We should minimize commute time.

I too prefer a voluntary 20 minute walk over a mandatory one. Then my brain can be aimed at what I value, not work.

j45
0 replies
5h11m

If you take a 1 hour commute (30 min each way)

It’s waking time, not sleeping time, which is out of a 16 hour waking day.

5 hours a week makes about 20 hours a month roughly, which is about half an extra work week to live that you miss out on.

Multiply that 30 minute commute each way by 12 months and it’s close to 260 hours a year.

160 hours a month of work so you get back about 1.6 working months to put into something else.

I had a few minute commute for 10 years. It was an unfair advantage.

wegfawefgawefg
0 replies
4h55m

I cant find a company that doesnt implode in less than a year.

Edit: Subcontractor at bp. Opec crunch. entire floor fired. Hardware startup, unexpected giant bill overnight. Layoffs. Fullstack webshop, sales didnt land. Crypto finance gig, asset prices crashed, clients all went broke instantly.

Sometimes thats just how it is.

bdw5204
7 replies
3h57m

The solution to that problem is to count the travel time and any required breaks as part of work hours while also reimbursing all travel expenses. That would require employers to pay the full cost of unnecessary in-person work on both ends and would strongly disincentivize them from doing it.

Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?

justneedaname
1 replies
3h40m

Not quite comparable though I would say, given that you know what you're signing up for when applying for a job. Travelling to a conference is a one-off whereas you'd be expecting to come to your job everyday (given the contract states this). You wouldn't accept a job in another country and turn round expecting them to pay for your flights, hotel etc. to be in the area during the work week

ralmidani
0 replies
3h24m

Aside from being compensated directly for daily commutes (on which we could reasonably disagree), there’s also an issue around liability: if someone crashes going to work and the other side wants to sue, should the company be liable, the employee, or both? Being “on-the-clock” makes it more likely the company would bear responsibility, as opposed to being “off-the clock”. Company cars seem to be less common now than they were even 10 years ago. A personal injury lawsuit could easily bankrupt a household, but is much less likely to bankrupt a mid-sized or large company.

fulladder
1 replies
2h21m

One twist on your idea: why not give the employers some incentives to spread out more? For example, if they want you to live in a city center Monday through Friday, they should have to pay for your city housing. (If you want to own a house and go there on weekends, you can buy one independent of the employer.) This would cause employers to rethink the idea that they should be locating themselves in places like San Francisco or New York.

frumper
0 replies
2h9m

If people stay in terrible working conditions to maintain health insurance, I can't imagine the kinds of pressures involved when your home is tied to changing jobs.

ralmidani
0 replies
3h37m

It makes perfect sense to you, and me, but unfortunately, in America at least, the upper hand is very much with employers. I could be semi-OK with non-reimbursement for salaried workers if daily travel was factored in, but for those on hourly wages it’s immoral to have commuting expenses (time __and__ money) eat significantly into wages.

We actually deal with this nonsense in our household; my wife is hourly and between the commute, parking, and walking to/from her workplace she loses about 20-25% compared to the time she actually gets paid for. We also spend a lot on gas, and have been putting ridiculous miles on her daily driver. Not to mention physical fatigue and emotional stress; she talks about quitting at least once a week. All for a mediocre wage (I would have said it’s garbage if she was our sole earner - my compensation is about double hers and I WFH).

Edit: also, I remember company cars being a thing not too long ago. I don’t hear about them as much as I used to.

julianozen
0 replies
3h42m

I would argue this is implicitly paid in salary differences

DiggyJohnson
0 replies
3h7m

Wouldn't this subsidize other's to live further away from work? I think this might have up having unintended negative externalities. It doesn't seem "fair", because I could get paid more for living further away (assuming I'm compensated for commuting time beyond just the cost of depreciation, gas, and maintenance).

steveBK123
6 replies
2h32m

I've generally had a 30-40min commute most of my career, but also generally had a flexible enough start time that exact to the minute arrival at my desk was not performance impacting.

Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.

For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.

Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.

For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".

mrweiner
3 replies
2h10m

Why are you working at all during what was your commuting time? You weren’t getting paid for those 7.5-10 hours before, so you’re in a worse position now unless your pay increased commensurate with the extra hours. That should have translated into more personal hours, not more working hours.

steveBK123
2 replies
2h5m

I took on a role with earlier/longer expected hours, but with the agreement I would do it remotely. And yes it's for a lot more money, not just an extra 10-20% for the extra 10-20% hours.

mrweiner
1 replies
2h4m

Ah, good on ya!

steveBK123
0 replies
1h55m

To be fair though, my previous role I found the day got longer during/post COVID because senior managers suddenly felt empowered to schedule meetings earlier and later.

In some cases, it was getting brought into more senior manager meetings I previously wasn't privy to, that had always been too early (7-8am).

In other cases, it was moving those same managers goal posts because they'd always been online early and hey if you want access to them, the only place to find time on their calendar was like 8am or 5pm.

I know A LOT of senior IC / team lead people who fell into this trap during COVID.

lacrimacida
1 replies
2h17m

For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office

How sustainable is to work 11-12 hours a day though? If we do 5 hours of intense work and the rest is spent in meetings or other overhead activities make 8 hours just enough to make it sustainable over long periods of time…

steveBK123
0 replies
1h58m

Let's put it this way. I'm expected to be readily accessible for 9-10 hours/day, and reachable for some hours outside of that. I have some operational responsibilities in the morning, maybe 1~3 hours of meetings and fully understood we get in far less than 5 hours of intense work. People are generally cool with me being totally away from desk for lunch.

How I spend the time in between in terms of doing research/reading/etc is up to me. If I had to do this in an office setting it would suck to be stuck there when stuff does come up.

raxxorraxor
6 replies
6h0m

I absolutely let my employer pay for my commute. Indirectly of course, but my income requirements are dependent on how much hours I have to put into work, which includes my overall time investment. Same with all other costs I have because of work.

That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.

If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.

jen20
2 replies
5h17m

Better coffee is definitely situational, especially if your employer buys over roasted beans.

raxxorraxor
1 replies
4h45m

I have good coffee at home but my boss is a fanatical addict that considers bad coffee a mortal sin.

bluefirebrand
0 replies
3h53m

It sounds like you're lucky to have that boss if you really enjoy coffee. I would wager most bosses are fanatical cheapskates that consider expensive coffee an unnecessary cost

bob88jg
1 replies
5h50m

It's not the financial cost of the time that's important it's the time itself - it's the requirement to completely go against my internal body clock to be at a location by a socially determined starting time - I start working at 10am usually - from home that means I can get up at 8.30 perhaps- to be in an office that means 6.30 am - I don't want to wake up at that time...

FireBeyond
0 replies
2h28m

Disclaimer: not saying regular exercise isn't important...

There is a meme, or some "motivational" thing that floats around. "Exercise for an hour a day. It's less than 5% of your day - what's your excuse?"

Uhh... because, if I factor in: - 8 hours for sleeping

- 8 hours for working

- 1.5-2 hours for commuting

- 0.5-1 hour to get ready for work

- 1 hour to prepare and eat dinner

All of a sudden we are at 19-20 hours, and it's not less than 5% of my day, it's actually 25% of my day.

caskstrength
0 replies
2h21m

Usually office coffee sucks though. Do you have real manual espresso machine in the office and a person who is responsible for operating and regularly cleaning it? The automatic kind with "americano" and "espresso" buttons can't really make a good coffee.

teaearlgraycold
1 replies
18m

I just commute during work hours. My boss is fine with this and I'm in the office around 6.5 hours per day.

intended
0 replies
5m

Which is perfect. If that time is counted as part of work, thats a good deal. That is ideally what it should change to.

PhoenixReborn
1 replies
4h53m

Not just time cost, but also monetary cost. At least in tech, most jobs exist in a small set of metro areas where housing prices are incredibly high. Pushing for more remote work enables more flexibility in where people live / can ease some of the housing pressure on these congested metros.

coffeebeqn
0 replies
3h17m

And the housing in those cities scales terribly when you have kids. What might’ve been doable with 1 or 2 people traps you into very high rent or mortgage (+ even worse commute) to have room for a family. I moved out of the west coast - which I really liked as a place - to be closer to family and to pay 1/3 to 1/2 for the housing

Spooky23
0 replies
1h56m

It’s really more than that. I live in the city, my office is 7 minutes away most mornings.

The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.

I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.

End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.

KptMarchewa
0 replies
5h16m

Exactly. For me, there's nothing better than 15 minute walking commute.

blagie
13 replies
7h10m

This is my experience. My productivity on coding is a lot hire remote. On many leadership / management-style tasks, it's a lot lower.

Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.

weebull
5 replies
6h10m

It's the point where you're no longer an individual contributor. Running a team and keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely.

Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.

I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.

intended
2 replies
5h26m

I argue against this point. I believe it indicates a skill gap, not a physical law.

If you've played MMOs, been parts of raids, or been active in a guild - you figure out how to solve these problems.

I've been in a community management and moderation role entirely online - those interactions and issues were, by far, the most subjective and complex project discussions I have had to conduct.

I believe that there is an entire generation of workers AND managers, who will be entering the workforce with highly effective remote working habits.

The caveat is, that this applies to work that can be done online, where your product can be examined and verified online.

jltsiren
1 replies
4h32m

The MMO generation already entered the workforce a long time ago. Many of them are now middle-aged professionals. But because MMOs have always been a relatively niche hobby, with even the most popular games having only a few million daily players, their impact has not been that significant. They are a small minority in the overall workforce, and while they do have effective remote working habits, they have been self-selected for the ability and interest to form communities online.

intended
0 replies
14m

I think that was the reminder that I am very much middle aged now.

You are right, however I would say that raids and coordinated e-sports were on the periphery when I was playing. I had to set up my own teams and lan tournaments.

Nice distinction to highlight though, thank you! The skill set would require specific coordination skills, not just being able to play team matches occasionally.

I suppose its proof that the skill exists, just not its distribution in the workforce.

macNchz
0 replies
4h19m

It was certainly a learning experience to lead a fully remote team having only ever done so in an office, but I’m not convinced it’s explicitly more difficult on the whole.

Most offices I’ve been in have had deficient conference room setups and open floor plans, and I’ve come to enjoy the ease with which private conversations, pairing, and ad hoc meetings can happen without being disruptive to others or booking a room way in advance.

I do think that conversations have higher bandwidth in person, and I’ve really missed having a proper big whiteboard to gather around, but I’ve come to realize that this restriction can be a positive forcing function for organizations to write things out and maintain more organized planning documents, which is a desirable outcome.

blagie
0 replies
4h24m

I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.

I think this is extremely cynical. Feedback makes for good organizations, and when I built teams, anyone who doesn't value, actively solicit, and provide good feedback doesn't have a very long tenure.

There are many things which go into building this culture, but I think I've only had one or two cases where this led to negative career impact for individuals. Most people adopt to this very quickly, very well, and work well in high-feedback settings.

I've absolutely never had, nor could imagine having, this problem on teams I've led.

Much more, I find the limitation is on my end. Going for a walk-and-talk is relaxing. A Zoom meeting is tiring. 1-2 Zoom meetings per day is not a problem, but a day of Zoom meetings basically leaves me a zombie. Group meetings are also much more tiring online than 1:1s.

I'm a good in-person manager. I'm also a good remote IC. I not nearly as good with those flipped around.

I also don't find any of these to be the case for me:

keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely

I can do all of those individually -- quite well -- remotely. I just can't do those for anywhere close to 8 hours per day.

To be very clear: That's me. I'm not speaking for you or for anyone else, and YMMV. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing other stories or contradictory opinions, and how things work for others.

jack_riminton
2 replies
7h2m

This is it. Add to the fact that poor managers don't really understand or know what their staff are doing, it gives them anxiety. If the same poor manager is in an office with them and can see them at their desk then it alleviates that somewhat.

Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.

walledstance
0 replies
6h47m

“Managing people is really really hard”

I like your reply, but for different reasons. I am a middle school teacher, and my day to day is managing people. It is tiring, decidedly so, and yet at the end of the day, management is rewarding for me for because it is relationship building through gaining individual understanding and building classroom consensus.

I love my job and am good at my job. But if I’m to step outside of my classroom your latter quote becomes far too truthful for me:

“we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly”

Your quote applies directly to my supposed superiors; assistant principals, principals, and higher ups in the school board. Most of the managerial class outside of a classroom is trash at their jobs. Their management style seems mostly morale busting and ego inflation at day’s end.

I agree with you, just from a different occupational domain.

icedchai
0 replies
5h2m

Yep. It's the old "butts in seats" philosophy. The new one is "keep your Slack dot green" (or equivalent.) Many managers were always clueless what their staff are doing at the office. Many still are. It's incredible that we have all these tools (Jira, Asana, Github, Slack...) plus many are forced to give status updates in daily standups and other assorted "agile" nonsense, yet there are still those can't figure out what people are working on.

julianozen
0 replies
3h40m

I agree with this

dfxm12
0 replies
4h3m

I have a lot of interpersonal work, with people all around the world. Going into the office just to talk on these people on Teams doesn't give a productivity boost. Being able to do this or not is a skill, just like coding is a skill. I try not to bog down my team if I'm deficient in some skill, instead, I work to improve it.

brandall10
0 replies
7h0m

I think this is largely it - the whole maker vs. manager thing... when your job relies on focus, being in a situation where you can control distractions is a benefit. But when your job relies on getting others' attention it can clearly be a negative, esp. if the culture is not thoroughly supportive.

It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.

AndrewKemendo
0 replies
6h6m

Seems pretty obvious to me that this has always been the divide

brailsafe
7 replies
6h39m

Some people require micro management and constant oversight

Aside from having an actual assistant, is this just hypothetical or do you know someone that prefers being micromanaged?

wsc981
1 replies
5h15m

Seems if you have staff that needs constant oversight and micromanagement, it's a waste of your own time. Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

anthomtb
0 replies
40m

Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?

I had to do something like this. Not every hour, but several times a day was needed to keep this person on track and productive. And no, I did not want to check on an otherwise-functional adult that frequently. Nor did anyone else, but circumstances led to them working on my team.

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

Yes, that was the best option and is ultimately what happened. Going through the required HR hoops was just as much effort as micromanaging, which is why no one bothered to do it for several years. It was easier to shuffle them off to another project and tell the lead "they're alright, they just need to work on communication".

rvba
0 replies
6h2m

Interns, new employees...

maccard
0 replies
5h11m

I have worked with people who needed explicit instructions for every step to perform, and if they complete what is assigned to them they will quietly sit and pass the time until they are explicitly told to do something.

This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".

If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.

However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.

Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.

If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.

halfcat
0 replies
5h25m

It’s not a preference to be micromanaged.

It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.

You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.

Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.

Grayskull
0 replies
6h8m

I dont think this is about workers preference. People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation, but when directly asked nobody will tell you they like micromanaged (seen this). Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.

CPLX
0 replies
6h22m

Yes. Like a thousand times yes. I learned this lesson as a manager very slowly because I hate being micromanaged.

It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.

steveBK123
6 replies
2h43m

Right, I think the important nuance is that "it depends" and therefore, top-down C-level suite dictates on Remote/Hybrid/In-office requirements are generally more punitive than useful.

If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.

repeekad
4 replies
2h28m

I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent

steveBK123
3 replies
2h7m

I don't know how important all this social science stuff is to be honest.

I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people.

What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly.

Remote is a forcing function on better written communication.

It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?

repeekad
1 replies
1h48m

Oh and to be clear I’m less commenting on productivity, more on the soft stuff like sense of belonging to the org, enjoying time at work, and building real relationships. These things are strictly local, no one expects to form relationships with the accounting team in Ireland, and having an explicit process for interacting with them is probably more important than an explicit process for interacting with your manager.

How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team

steveBK123
0 replies
42m

I mean I get the intention of this stuff, but some of it skates dangerously close to accidental discrimination. I am not accusing you of this, but just saying people should be mindful it can accidentally lead you down the wrong path.

Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens.

Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important.

I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.

wharvle
0 replies
23m

In my experience, remote takes already-inefficient and error-prone workplace communication cultures that manage to muddle by with in-office workers at "merely" a significant productivity cost, and makes it totally unworkable.

The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work.

Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.

pompino
0 replies
8m

IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.

e_i_pi_2
3 replies
4h44m

the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects > in the setup that's decided

I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation

zajio1am
0 replies
57m

'place of work' is usually (here in Czechia) defined in a labor contract. So that cannot change because 'team decided'. I have contract with my employer, not with my team.

swozey
0 replies
2h32m

I can't imagine a C-suite determining literally anything about my team beyond allowing it to exist in the budget.

I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.

pompino
0 replies
5m

you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation

Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.

rTX5CMRXIfFG
2 replies
3h6m

I hope it's OK to dissent here since all the other comments agree with you anyway. Regarding this:

The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.

The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.

If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?

epolanski
0 replies
1h16m

If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement?

As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.

The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.

Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.

In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.

There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).

In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.

Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?

I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.

But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.

codingdave
0 replies
3h0m

I am 100% in the remote work camp, but I agree with you. Every company has the right to make the choice that works for them... whether empirically driven or not, it is their prerogative to choose. But they do then need to hire the people for whom that choice works. And as people looking for work, we need to accept that some companies are non-viable for us because of the choices they make.

The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.

spacemadness
1 replies
1h52m

I’ve seen team managers blame design work being poor or unproductive on having remote workers when most of the team isn’t. And then when everyone is flown in they claim a great victory when the output is the same or worse. I think many managers with poor performing teams are using the opportunity to blame poor performance on remote with zero data to back that up. It’s simply a useful group to blame for all your problems often due to hiring a team of less experienced people so you can pay them less.

wubrr
0 replies
1h45m

Pretty much agree, but ultimately the onus on hiring the right people is on the hiring manager. The pattern here is management blaming their own incompetence on anything that doesn't lead back to themselves, such as WFH. Then you have higher level leadership eating this up because of their own laziness and incompetence. Incompetence all the way up.

manicennui
1 replies
33m

"Some people require micro management and constant oversight"

In my experience these people don't thrive in the office either. For software engineering in particular, these people are not useful employees.

pompino
0 replies
10m

But they exist, have jobs, and are producing things of value for other companies. You still have to deal with them.

It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.

boppo1
1 replies
6h18m

forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided

So offering people remote work for a 20% TC reduction?

mlrtime
0 replies
5h58m

Not across the board, no.

Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.

Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)

RamblingCTO
1 replies
1h39m

Good take!

What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucked up, not your remote/not remote thing?

ElevenLathe
0 replies
1h31m

It's absolutely true that the real problem in the US is our public transit (and by extension basically all post-WW2 buildings and infrastructure) situation, but if I'm just a guy running a software company, there doesn't seem to be much I can do about that. Hence all the hand-wringing about remote work.

I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.

The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.

wubrr
0 replies
1h48m

The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.

Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.

At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.

I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.

user3939382
0 replies
3h31m

I agree in general except on this

workload splitting where syncing isn't very important

I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.

This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.

sam0x17
0 replies
2h14m

The debate is dramatically simplified when you take into account the gargantuan environmental impact of maintaining massive 24/7 climate-controlled office spaces that are vacant other than 40 hours a week (vacant for 75% of the week) and having people commute 15 minutes to 1.5 hours a day to and from these office spaces in motor vehicles, versus simply not leaving your house and re-purposing these sky-scrapers for societal goods like cheap/free high quality public housing, etc.

You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.

ralmidani
0 replies
3h56m

This kind of nuance is also brought up in sister comments, but you probably explained it best. With the caveat that C-suite mandates should not be the only determinant; let teams have some degree of autonomy and self-organization, and be able to advocate for what works best for them.

It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.

It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.

internet101010
0 replies
4h13m

You used "some" in a lot of your sentences and that sums it up perfectly. Some people work better at home, some people work better in an office. Some jobs require more collaboration than others. I am the first to admit that meetings are usually a tad more productive in person but arbitrary "two days at office" policies make no sense, especially if there is not a policy where everybody has to go in on the same day(s).

Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.

goodpoint
0 replies
5h27m

lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature

Or in some specific countries and company cultures...

furyg3
0 replies
6h3m

Totally agree, since the individual's situation varies so much (both intra-team, in their personal life, and across time) the only conclusion that can be said at a c-suite level is that nothing should be broadly mandated and that teams should have the option to decide on their own about office vs remote.

I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
3h36m

Strong agree.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.

My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.

SoftTalker
91 replies
14h1m

Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.

Sparkyte
25 replies
13h35m

Water cooler chat used to be the big thing when I worked in an office.

nox101
18 replies
11h40m

I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was obvious to say "Good morning, what's up" and have him tell me.

This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.

This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.

Gigachad
16 replies
10h1m

This is just the truth. And the responses I get when pointing this out are either along the lines of “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” and “technically you can have those same conversations in the slack #random if you wanted.”

Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.

lloeki
13 replies
9h20m

Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.

A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.

I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).

“I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”

This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.

While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.

Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.

Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.

helboi4
11 replies
6h23m

Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in. I've never had that experience. People are always somewhat intersting and like to actually talk. There are some off days but it's never like that. And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working. I've had people never turn their cameras on. And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable. The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.

mlrtime
5 replies
5h21m

For every positive that I can possibly read about in office work. Not one can combat my horrible situation of working next to a colleague with post nasal drip. Imagine every 60s hearing the sound of phlegm being sucked through a throat.

I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.

helboi4
4 replies
4h49m

That's an insanely specific situation that could be remedied by getting your seat moved. Loads of offices have hot desks these days anyway. What I'm talking about - young people having no chance to build a network of peers because the end of their university years were ruined by COVID and now they are expected to work from home without interacting with humans ever, leading to severely negative mental health outcomes - is ubiquitous to all remote working situations. the only solution to it is some level of compulsory office attendance. it is only since i move to an office with 3 days semi-compulsory that I have started to talk to people regularly again and regained the ability to work efficiently and not want to die.

mlrtime
3 replies
4h30m

Agreed, young people coming up in their career are at a disadvantage working remotely.

My story is an anecdote, and moving seats was not an option. For this situation I might as well be remote if I'm not next to the team.

helboi4
2 replies
3h34m

Yes, your story is an isolated and minor anecdote and my story is a massive social ill that I am furious that older people want to overlook and then wonder why younger peoples mental health and productivity is getting constantly worse. So I don't appreciate you bringing up your anecdote as if it has any relevance to what I'm saying.

p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.

mlrtime
1 replies
1h54m

You're lack of appreciation maybe related to your fury.

Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.

In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!

helboi4
0 replies
1h40m

Nah mate, you pulled that one out of nowhere. It's pretty widely understood our mental health issues are due to lonliness and social isolation and social media (fake virtual socialising) mate.

RGamma
3 replies
3h36m

Why not have a Teamspeak/Discord like system where you can hang around all day in various rooms (e.g. virtual bureaus) and do the "office chit chat"?

The meeting model is more like phone calls and, while I adore WFH, not well suited for that.

helboi4
2 replies
1h56m

1) I'm not a robot. Humans exist in physical space and it is necessary for our mental health to see other people in person. We cannot get our social battery filled by virtual interaction alone. 2) Otther people don't participate in these things very often when I try to suggest them. People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces. Therefore, the solution is the office.

RGamma
1 replies
1h33m

1) heavily depends on the person (you seem the extraverted type who seem to suffer the most; for instance I can go weeks without much f2f interaction and not be disturbed by it).

And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...

helboi4
0 replies
1h14m

Don't worry I moved to a company where people have to come in 2-3 times a week and the culture is great and I'm not depressed any more. It works much better than any other setup I've tried.

My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.

nostrebored
0 replies
3h1m

They don’t think about what it’s like for young people to onboard.

You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.

It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.

Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.

uxcolumbo
0 replies
7h32m

Great response. Also not everyone is working on exciting GPU related projects.

Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.

Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.

Snow_Falls
0 replies
9h14m

Perhaps its a matter of workplace? I don't think many people would describe their jobs as having personality or humanity.

BeFlatXIII
0 replies
1h44m

Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.

Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.

lloeki
0 replies
9h46m

Our Ruby guild is ~6 ppl and counting. We are all remote, and not a single one is in the same geo.

We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.

That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.

It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.

sangnoir
1 replies
10h49m

90-minute lunches, extended ping-pong table visits, "attending" meetings one doesn't contribute to are various ways to waste time at the office, but no one is eager to banish those. It appears it's only a problem when people slack at home; on the flip-side, no one is offering bonuses for those when they work until 7 or 8 pm because WFH can blur division between work and not-work life.

331c8c71
0 replies
10h27m

There are many companies where long lunches are frowned upon (unofficially). People eating at their desks etc...

irrational
1 replies
13h4m

I’ve worked in an office for over 25 years. I’ve never chatted with anyone at the water cooler (those, these days it is a water dispenser machine that can dispense cold or hot still water or sparkling water). I assume this water cooler chat thing must be from farther back in time.

jdlshore
0 replies
11h53m

Water cooler chat doesn’t need to involve a literal water cooler. It’s an expression for the casual chit-chat that occurs when you encounter someone in the hallway.

dboreham
0 replies
3h15m

Yes, but even 20+ years ago when I worked for a large Silicon Valley company: most of the people I interacted with were in different buildings so it was easier to email them than to go find them. Then we acquired a team in another country. When I went remote in 1999 one of the reasons I could justify that was that when I drove to the office every day I usually spent each day communicating by email and phone with colleagues.

bediger4000
0 replies
13h25m

Bah, thing of the past! Now it's mostly organic breakthrough moments of creativity. At a few places it's serendipitious collaboration, of course.

goalieca
20 replies
14h0m

Some do it to get a break. Doing 40 hours of straight “creative” work is impossible.

ryanSrich
8 replies
13h1m

Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches.

The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.

rebeccaskinner
6 replies
12h42m

I started managing a team with the “no meetings, let people do good work” philosophy and I can just say that I’m glad I was given the space as a new manager to find my feet, because I didn’t find that it worked well when taken to an extreme.

Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.

The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.

meindnoch
1 replies
8h11m

5 to 6 hours of standing meetings

Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive.

rebeccaskinner
0 replies
2h43m

They are doing far better now than with fewer meetings, and they’ve consistently agreed that the additional meetings are valuable, so yeah, I think they are.

allset_
1 replies
10h38m

5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week

Wow that is a lot. That is (almost) a WHOLE DAY of meetings each week just for syncs.

I can only provide my own anecdotes, but I'm at 0.5-1hr for standup status-report type meetings.

rebeccaskinner
0 replies
2h22m

Everyone replying seems to be assuming this time is all for standups and status meetings, but in practice it’s probably about half an hour a week for status updates for us to. The rest of the time is a mix of reserved time for synchronous technical collaboration (e.g. reserved time for pairing, time to talk about technical architecture at a higher level and for people to opt in to presenting some of their work for feedback)

My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.

For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.

sensanaty
0 replies
6h34m

I'd blow my brains out if I has to sit through 6 hours of useless meetings a week.

I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.

mjevans
0 replies
9h10m

The important thing is to identify what the outputs (of meetings etc) should _be_ and then work backwards from that to how to accomplish the task _remotely_ and _asynchronously_.

pdimitar
0 replies
9h53m

I started work in a new company December 2023 and they did exactly what you said and boy, am I feeling great about this workplace! I do focus on my work, I achieve results, I make sure they are visible (some documentation and internal knowledge base management are involved but I don't detest it; it becomes the way to gauge my performance and I am not against it) and everyone is happy.

It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.

mportela
5 replies
13h23m

Not only creative work, but manual work too. It's been over 100 years that Frederick Taylor showed regular breaks reduces fatigue and increases productivity. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

williamcotton
4 replies
13h12m

Taylor would, correctly, have knowledge workers filling out very detailed timesheets of their daily activities in order to optimize overall efficiency.

Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.

Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.

shermantanktop
3 replies
11h28m

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.

williamcotton
2 replies
6h14m

As margins slim in our industry, which they will, would you rather have management understand the true costs of things or would you rather have over-hiring followed by mass firing?

I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.

This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.

Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.

This if course needs to:

1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and

2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.

Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.

Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.

They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.

Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.

shermantanktop
1 replies
2h35m

That’s very industry-dependent. I worked in a tech company that acquired a creative production company, and the tech leadership attempted to impose a metrics-based approach to what was a traditional creative process. That process had obvious signs of waste, including a high failure rate, excess travel expenses, etc., when compared to averages.

The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.

williamcotton
0 replies
53m

I’m talking about simple costs! Putting dollar values on activities, not weird Git rankings, OKRs, etc.

suslik
1 replies
13h4m

A semi-relevant anecdote: over the Christmas break (which was > 2 weeks for me), I was pouring 12-14 hours a day into my personal hobby project and didn’t feel tired or bored at all. I literally couldn’t stop working on it.

Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.

ChatGTP
0 replies
8h52m

I'm the same, I been busting out the pomodor method to help me get through it.

maxmorlocke
1 replies
13h32m

Seriously. As an engineer and engineering leader, I cannot maintain focus to code, sit in meetings, and a variety of other tasks for more than 2-3 hours without a break. It is good to get up, move around, catch up on the news, etc. Taking appropriate breaks and conducting self care gives my mind an opportunity to decompress, allowing me to come back to work more focused and productive. Very long sessions (5+ hours) without a break tend to run into a wall - I may still be doing work, but the quality drops precipitously. Sometimes, I can raise my productivity by distracting myself with home chores (e.g. laundry). Sometimes, I find a quick dip into the news or a catchup on our friend group's discord server productive. This may not be the same for all of us, but studies have repeatedly shown breaks improve productivity for most individuals. Being outside the office, I find it much more convenient to take a productive break without having other coworkers distracting me. Looking over studies and suggestions, it seems interesting to me that tasks like meditation, power naps, small chores, snacks, listening to music, and interacting with pets are much more easily conducted in the comfort of our homes.

https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/taking-breaks/ https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-take-better-breaks-at-work-ac...

helboi4
0 replies
6h26m

Or you can be in the office and speak to people. I've never been in an office for a professional job where chatting, popping down to the canteen, stepping outside for a bit etc are not completely normal things to do and not frowned upon. For young people without families and pets, having a thriving office where we can take social breaks sometimes is important. Otherwise I literally just sit in my room and want to die. This is why I'm glad my company has 3 days compulsory.

postalrat
0 replies
13h44m

What other things are you doing for 40 straight hours?

aurareturn
19 replies
13h55m

Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.

How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?

Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).

williamcotton
9 replies
13h40m

How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?

If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.

irrational
5 replies
13h7m

Depends on your definition of meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that public school teaching, working in a nursing home, working as a social worker is meaningful, but I wouldn’t find any of those to be interesting.

echelon
3 replies
12h41m

Working on a startup pursuing your topic / field of interest might do the trick.

There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).

There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.

Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.

jdlshore
1 replies
12h12m

Building a startup is full of uninteresting work. Same for games and any other field. Everything has its boring parts.

(Especially building startups. What a slog that is. The fun part is building the product, and that’s a fraction of what you have to do.)

echelon
0 replies
2h49m

There's one infinitesimal wake period during the age of the universe, and this sounds like making excuses to not do the thing you want to do.

Rip off the band aid and feel some pain.

murderfs
0 replies
12h10m

This is a fantastic way to turn something you enjoyed into something you hate.

mym1990
0 replies
11h59m

Who said anything about any of those jobs?

PeterStuer
1 replies
10h33m

Unpaid 'work' is usually referred to as a 'hobby'.

gambiting
0 replies
7h3m

Who said unpaid?

petesergeant
0 replies
9h43m

I think there are lots of jobs that are meaningful in a macro sense, but tedious in a micro sense. Most teachers I know like having the identity of a teacher, feel like they are meaningfully contributing to society, but really don't enjoy 90% of the actual work they do.

moooo99
2 replies
9h14m

How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?

I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.

In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.

I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.

And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?

wiether
0 replies
6h9m

Agree.

As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two : - working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money - working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy

Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO. Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies. Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.

s1artibartfast
0 replies
1h36m

Sometimes the optimal solution involves failure and cancelation. Im not saying the cancelations you experienced were correct, but unless you have a crystal ball, some strategy change and failure is expected. Of course that isn't an excuse for frivolous strategy, but the line is finer than most ICs understand.

novok
1 replies
9h10m

There is a lot of boring and low "meaning" work that needs to be done. To give a trite example, washing your dishes and keeping your house clean. Or brushing your teeth and flossing. Or making revenue dashboards tracking income and making sure that data reporting is accurate.

alephxyz
0 replies
2h56m

Doing the dishes is boring but it's offset by the satisfaction you feel from having a clean kitchen. Some tasks are both boring and make you feel useless after because all you're left with is a report that will rot in a middle management storage cabinet. I think a few 19th century German philosophers wrote about that extensively :)

technick
0 replies
12h47m

The only thing I've ever had issues with doing it remote is writing compliance policy, operational guidelines, and organizational standards. My boss wanted them re-written once every year into a different format and it destroyed my soul. What we had worked fine and didn't need to be re-written in my opinion.

rkuodys
0 replies
9h31m

I think any given job is neither interesting nor boring- it the attitude that makes it so. For example I am the person who don't like doing the stuff if I know how to do it - it boring for me, while my colleague is happily dingo stuff that is clean while skipping obscured tasks. Following this you cannot give someone interesting task, you can only guide person to choose the right perspective

helboi4
0 replies
6h28m

I would also raise the point that actually having relationships with your colleagues and team can make work a lot more meaningful and make you more motivated. It is impossible to do that if you don't meet them. The idea that corporate work can be motivating at all when you exist in a vaccuum in your bedroom is idiotic. Almost no work is ineherently interesting.

drakonka
0 replies
7h7m

I am not sure, but I have always pursued this kind of work by default and aggressively. Of course there will always be ups and downs, but when it stops feeling interesting, meaningful, and challenging for a prolonged period of time, I generally move on (or switch teams/projects!). But while it remains overall interesting and meaningful, I stay and hold on to it for as long as I possibly can. This has meant that I haven't job-hopped very much to climb the salary ladder, but have been very engaged and interested in every position. It's been a worthwhile tradeoff.

randomdata
6 replies
13h34m

Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom. If workers are screwing around when there is work that needs to be done, that is indicative of an environment that doesn't provide the proper failsafes.

That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.

nikkwong
2 replies
13h9m

I feel like you are wearing some very strong rose colored glasses; I personally think it’s naive to believe that remote workers are always highly engaged. People optimize their work productivity around different personal goals.. and I have worked with many who seem to try to do as little work as possible to not get fired. Which often involves a lot of loathing and procrastination.

It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.

randomdata
1 replies
13h2m

> and they would kill to do anything else with their time

And yet they don't. That is not because they are bored, but because they fear the possible failure.

nikkwong
0 replies
9h8m

No; they don’t, because they cannot afford to not.

knallfrosch
1 replies
4h19m

Or it's just boring work. I'm employed as software engineer with no reports as a team of 4 engineers. The project has entered maintenance mode and we just investigate bugs, chase teams we're dependent on, confirm a change works on 4 different versions.. my productivity has tanked.

I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.

chasd00
0 replies
2h36m

boredom is as bad as being swamped. I hate being bored, it's excruciating. At least with deadline pressure there's some adrenaline involved.

oceanplexian
0 replies
11h22m

Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom.

For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.

Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.

wodenokoto
5 replies
12h54m

Isn't that why people are paid to work? Because it isn't interesting or meaningful?

caseyohara
3 replies
12h40m

This is a pretty dim view, especially here on HN.

People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.

haizhung
1 replies
10h51m

It’s not completely wrong though. To be clear, I think basically any role can be meaningful to someone, depending on their views and upbringing.

However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.

As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.

So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.

gambiting
0 replies
5h15m

>As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.

Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.

Gigachad
0 replies
10h3m

The payment is a pretty big part of it. If you offered people the option to be paid the same amount for doing nothing, how many people do you think would stay doing their exact same current job vs leaving and perusing a hobby?

mlrtime
0 replies
5h31m

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ― Mark Twain

This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.

wahnfrieden
2 replies
11h54m

Or, give them real equity.

flanked-evergl
1 replies
8h39m

What would this involve? And can't they buy equity with their salaries if they wanted to?

wahnfrieden
0 replies
1h21m

Usually my employers haven’t let me buy as much equity as I’ve wanted to, they severely constrain the employee equity pool allocation and dole it out as occasional rewards and reserve most for non-worker investors and owners or executive roles.

For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc

Kiro
2 replies
11h14m

The only thing that can stop me from slacking off is my screen being visible to others.

prmoustache
1 replies
9h48m

Duh, nobody is looking at it. Everybody is either slacking off on their own screen or working.

petesergeant
0 replies
9h42m
steve1977
0 replies
12h2m

Also, don’t force them to be “at work” for 8 hours just because this worked in a factory.

makeitdouble
0 replies
12h13m

TBF, I think the balance shifts when you're at home.

At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.

This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.

falsandtru
0 replies
10h38m

It is interesting that this opinion is getting high marks in HN. Useful information for employers.

d3w4s9
0 replies
5h44m

Nah

If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is

VoodooJuJu
0 replies
6h38m

Bullshit jobs.

If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.

The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.

randomdata
75 replies
13h48m

> If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance

Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.

safety1st
34 replies
12h34m

Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention.

If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.

A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence

B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)

I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"

makeitdouble
9 replies
12h19m

In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently.

CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.

The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.

randomdata
8 replies
12h12m

> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time

Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.

As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.

ozim
5 replies
11h1m

That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit.

Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.

soco
4 replies
9h37m

A hard disagree on "companies that need them more than they need the company". A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing. But this is the culture we're in, paying the friends of the board millions regardless of their performance, because the board knows they get their backs rubbed as well.

robertlagrant
3 replies
9h1m

A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing

Can you give an example of a headless company that's running fine?

soco
1 replies
8h17m

Companies change CEOs all the time. There's weeks and months until the next one is coming in. Pick any company, just any, and you have your answer.

robertlagrant
0 replies
6h8m

You're right - there are usually interim CEOs to fill the gap. I don't see how interim CEOs are relevant here, though.

rvba
0 replies
5h49m

Too big too fail companies still run. Also they dont run fine, they just run.

mirekrusin
1 replies
10h41m

Difference in timezone is also something that immediately brings attention to "who's going to be managing that?".

CalRobert
0 replies
9h40m

Which always made me think it was odd South America didn't get more attention. I worked for Auth0 for a long time and they were started by a guy in Argentina and one in the US - the lack of time difference came up as a major benefit despite the geographical separation.

realusername
6 replies
10h28m

I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B

Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.

Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.

If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.

ponector
5 replies
7h7m

Outsourcing jobs and salaries exploded with COVID. 100k USD annual compensation is insane for many countries.

You can get best people overseas for a fraction of US costs, and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.

I'm glad this happens so I can use geographic arbitrage: work for US client but live in nice place in Europe with reasonable costs of living.

realusername
2 replies
6h44m

I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.

The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants.

As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago.

Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one.

And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year.

Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.

ponector
0 replies
2h57m

Maybe you are living in IT centers like Amsterdam or Berlin, but anywhere in south or east Europe 100k USD annual salary is almost unreachable for local employment.

Best talents are not paid at the similar level globally. Even tech giants like Google have different salary for same levels in different countries inside EU. You can get x2 if you move from Warsaw to Dublin or x3 if you move to Zurich.

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
6h1m

>I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.

Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.

dboreham
1 replies
3h18m

and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.

I don't think this can be true. An employer has to follow labor laws pertaining to the country of residence of their employees. Typically some sort of legal entity has to be established in those countries.

ponector
0 replies
2h54m

Not necessarily. You can sign a contract and push all legal stuff to the employee. Employee creates an LLC or other entity and selling consultancy services to the US client. No labor law attached to this relationship.

TheOtherHobbes
4 replies
7h56m

A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.

B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.

C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.

Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.

There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.

Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.

hiatus
3 replies
3h42m

This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments

I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?

bongodongobob
2 replies
2h53m

Lol what? 100% yes. It's super common to have a separate holding company for the real estate that the business leases from.

hiatus
1 replies
1h49m

Sure, can you give examples of companies whose executives own the holding company their business leases real estate from?

bongodongobob
0 replies
1h12m

It's common practice afaik, there's no secret there. I used to work for one and they are small peanuts.

Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.

thesuitonym
1 replies
4h27m

If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.

It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

wharvle
0 replies
3m

But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".

Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.

It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.

No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.

sublinear
1 replies
8h56m

B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too.

Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.

I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.

Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.

charlieyu1
0 replies
7h35m

Pay people enough so it is worth enough to come on-site. Which is probably double.

gumballindie
1 replies
7h6m

B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)

The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.

mlrtime
0 replies
5h48m

I don't disagree..

However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips.

What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.

dhx
1 replies
12h12m

Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives.

For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.

logifail
0 replies
9h21m

Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead

Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.

For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support

Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...

surgical_fire
0 replies
7h20m

just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B

Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.

There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".

ozim
0 replies
11h33m

Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.

In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.

If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.

Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.

flappyeagle
0 replies
3h28m

People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower.

Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.

Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.

Scarblac
0 replies
10h21m

Well the laundry is indirectly part of

C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.

jfoutz
30 replies
12h33m

Although it is pretty strong evidence office space is a boondoggle. That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line.

I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.

g96alqdm0x
16 replies
12h14m

that’s just fine and good for you, but please don’t impose your preferences on the rest of us.

californical
15 replies
11h58m

Why not? Companies will eventually sort into ones where likeminded people are together. Some will be more friendly to remote than others. If I want to work in person with people, I’ll join a company that agrees. If someone wants to be remote, they might have to join a different company.

Levitz
13 replies
9h46m

Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working on-site is borderline morally evil.

It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.

A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"

CalRobert
5 replies
9h38m

I love remote work but I don't know if I'd call it morally evil to have people on site. There's something to be said for being in the same physical space as your peers and the social bonds that form, etc.

But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.

Workaccount2
2 replies
3h11m

I see stories of people who have worked remote at a company for a year or so, and still have yet to see the faces of any of their coworkers. I get that dev work has a disproportionate amount of basement dwellers, but man, that is still so crazy to me.

potta_coffee
0 replies
27m

I haven't met a single one of my coworkers. About 4 of them are scattered around the US, the rest are in Europe, India and Southeast Asia.

CalRobert
0 replies
2h43m

For what it's worth I can have interesting, fulfilling relationships and friendships with people I only know online, both in and out of a work setting. But it is fun to hang out in person.

geraldhh
0 replies
7h42m

There's something to be said for being in the same physical space as your peers and the social bonds that form

indeed it seems that effective remote only work requires a more coherent team or more formalized processes.

HPsquared
0 replies
7h39m

"Net negative" is a more neutral way to put it. The way it's stated, if there is no productivity benefit and the employee doesn't like going to the office, then it's a loss for the employee and no gain for the employer. Overall a net loss in utility, no weightings needed in that example.

Mordisquitos
4 replies
7h43m

Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working remotely is borderline morally evil. It's unhealthier (loneliness, lack of work/life separation, physical inactivity), it's bad for the environment (climate control of a 100-people office is less energy intensive than that of 100 individual homes), and its costs are imposed on the worker rather than the business.

To be clear, I don't honestly believe the previous paragraph. I'm just using it to illustrate how one can pull out a "just so" story to argue the exact opposite that you're doing. I believe your argument is flawed in that makes a universal condemnation supported by generalisations based on local specifics.

I work in a company which, for all intents and purposes, allows its employees to be almost fully remote and yet a significant number of us actively choose to come to the office (partly motivated by things like free brunches from office management). The overwhelming majority of workers come to the office on foot, on public transport, by bike, or by electric scooter, and a tiny few come by motorbike. How is that "borderline morally evil"?

helboi4
2 replies
6h31m

I agree with your example paragraph. I think it is only beneficial for highly motivated senior engineers with families to work remotely. As a junior who doesn't know what I'm doing half of the time and feels demotivated without support, and as a single young person without a family that got cut off from building a community because of COVID, when I have worked mainly remotely I've been severely depressed. Not seeing people or leaving my house for most of the week makes me want to die not work harder.

DiggyJohnson
1 replies
2h47m

Well said. When I share a similar perspective some people seem to assume I'm extremely extroverted, or don't have friends or hobbies outside of work. I'm not very extroverted and I do have a full life outside of work. I still prefer a decent office to WFH, which makes me feel extremely isolated after awhile.

helboi4
0 replies
1h59m

Yeah, I'm not extremely extroverted either which is an issue because trying to make sure I reach the minimum amount of socialising I need to not tank my mental health is quite hard for me when I'm expected to do it 100% by myself. When you have a life at the office, you have a certain amount of passive social interaction and I think that's actually easier for people who are a bit shy. I certainly have a few friends left from uni and hobbies outside work, but trying to make new friends without any settings where you meet every day is quite hard imo. And I do not have as many friends as I would like so it feels hopeless for me. Or it did until I joined a sociable workplace with compulsory office time and other young people.

RGamma
0 replies
3h50m

GP implicitly assumed a large portion of cost is commute by car beside the general time/happiness cost.

For one, one would need to look into how many car commutes are avoidable to more precisely quantify the species-level irrationality of fossil-powered forced cramming of office towers inside cities day-in-and-out.

I'm sure it's all been done...

lynx23
0 replies
7h11m

I work on-site, and #1 and #2 of your argument do not apply to me. You forgot to define preconditions. You are finger-pointing at those which work on-site and have a relatively high distance between home and work. I walk to my workplace, which is healthy and does not produce any CO2. And I am not loosing sleep, because I walk 10 minutes. Just because you dont like a thing doesn't mean you thought it through.

goodpoint
0 replies
5h44m

Commuting by car on daily basis is the most dangerous activity most people do.

- risk of accidents

- sitting longer hours, leading to loss of muscle tone etc

- inhaling particulate from engines and tires

This stuff builds up over time. The decrease in life expectancy is real.

raizer88
0 replies
10h12m

Because firms that are on-site-only don't scale unless they pay top of the line money to move people. Access to a remote workforce is a force multiplier that will be more relevant the more time we go forward.

Garlef
10 replies
11h47m

That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line.

Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.

bilekas
7 replies
11h5m

Not quite, you're going to be paying rent for example regardless, you may have to invest in some office furniture which is usually subsidized but if not then consider the savings you would make through the year overall, perhaps transportation costs, lunches etc. Things add up fiscally. Ignoring the lifestyle benefits.

331c8c71
3 replies
10h32m

In many places on Earth one would need to pay a substantially higher rent/price to get an extra room to use as an office. And in a family situation one would ideally need two extra rooms...

raizer88
2 replies
9h27m

Yes, but in a remote work family you can buy an house everywhere. You pay a lot less in rent outside the city.

marcosdumay
0 replies
5h20m

You don't have work anymore as a constraint, but it's not the only constraint to where people live.

If you are single and want to live alone, you can certainly optimize the hell out of housing costs. But of course, each single constraint you remove will probably let you reduce your costs by a bit.

jen20
0 replies
5h8m

Working remote need not be conflated with wanting to live in the suburbs. Indeed part of the reason I negotiated remote was because I live downtown, and the office is way out in the burbs.

CalRobert
2 replies
9h36m

This is nominally true but when I was looking for a place to rent I needed to be sure it had a space for remote work, which made it more expensive. I tried working from a desk in a wide part of my hallway or in my room (shared with my spouse) and it really didn't work. If you have young kids a separate room is pretty much a must, and ideally, a separate structure (like a small backyard office).

rob74
1 replies
8h54m

Yeah, I guess this aspect is underappreciated here on HN: most "hackers" also hack in their spare time, so probably already have a desk (maybe even a separate room) where they have good working conditions at home.

CalRobert
0 replies
7h33m

I do this too, but generally after the kids go to bed in which case the couch is fine.

potta_coffee
0 replies
26m

That tradeoff is worth it to me because driving on the freeway every day is nerve wracking and soul destroying.

SantalBlush
0 replies
6h52m

It's generally more expensive to buy/rent a smaller place in a metro area near the office and commute there than it is to buy/rent a place with a home office in a more reasonably priced area.

When all expenses are considered, working in-office can (and often does) cost the employee way more money than remote.

akira2501
0 replies
9h1m

evidence office space is a boondoggle

It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.

PeterStuer
0 replies
10h38m

You forget that the same 'investors' that own the companies, also own the buildings and all the companies that finance, build and service the buildings as well as the whole 'economy' fueled by employees commuting and lunching etc.

lynx23
3 replies
7h18m

I guess your boss doesn't really care if you managed to do laundry during work hours. You personally might care since you saved yourself some time, but that is a very personal thing. OTOH, if family is at home, it is also very easy for them to grab you for something seemingly important. With the "right" demanding wife, your boss always looses.

jen20
2 replies
5h4m

With the wrong demanding coworker or (especially) midwit middle manager who wants to talk about sportsball or politics, your entire company loses, not sure what your (rather sexist) point is tbh.

Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.

stevenhuang
0 replies
1h27m

Demanding wife or demanding husband. His point was about family being home.

earthling8118
0 replies
9m

By focusing on the word "wife" and calling it sexism you miss the point of the comment entirely. I agree with your side of the conversation but nitpicking words and throwing in an attack doesn't help the conversation.

nox101
1 replies
11h31m

I think it's going to be both different for different people and different for different types of jobs. maybe making web apps is not affected at all by work from home where as some other jobs, say game dev, where you'd like to tweak something and hand the controller to your partner to test immediately "does it feel better than the last tweak from 15 seconds ago?" is more affected by work from home? In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat. Or back to games, I suspect adjust local-multiplayer gameplay is not something you can do without actually having multiple people in the same physical location.

As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.

Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.

maigret
0 replies
6h14m

In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat

For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.

rendaw
0 replies
12h17m

Also poor management could impose an upper limit on productivity, which would allow measuring performance loss but not gain.

logan5201
0 replies
8h55m

How is industry productivity not relevant to the point being made? It’s quite possible for there to be a direct correlation between work productivity and industry productivity. You are also discounting many other benefits of remote work. While yes someone may be doing laundry when they should be filling out expense reports, they are also not spending time on a lengthy commute. As a result they are also spending less time at the gas station and for car maintenance bills. I’ll admit I do personal chores on the company’s dime, but the time and resources I save by working remote make up for it at the very least.

charlieyu1
0 replies
7h34m

I'm glad that I'm in an environment that only output is measured. Nobody cares how you get there, what do you daily in the slack hours, etc

__loam
12 replies
12h19m

This is not what I want to happen, but I have to think the American tech worker gets screwed in the world where remote work is the norm. If you make the labor market global, there's a lot of really smart Europeans who will work for half or a third of what American devs will. Can anyone refute this line of thinking? I'd love to be wrong.

npsomaratna
5 replies
11h44m

1. Labor law is local. This adds (on a per-country basis) legal risk and compliance costs, as well as operational costs (e.g., you might need to have specific policies that apply to employees in specific countries).

2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.

3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.

When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.

redcobra762
3 replies
11h30m

No, sorry. These are all defeated by hiring contractors.

The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.

The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.

npsomaratna
2 replies
11h20m

Not necessarily.

Consider this situation: you hire a contractor. They work for you for several years, and then you fire them. The contractor goes to the labor court in their country and files a claim stating that, yes, their contract says that they are an independent contractor, but no, since you've employed them "full-time" for several years continuously, they are a defacto/de jure employee. (Which is a valid argument under the labor laws of certain countries)

What will you do:

- Spend the time and money refuting their claim? (You need to find a good lawyer in that foreign country; lawyers are expensive; and someone on your side needs to spend their time coordinating with them)

- Ignore the claim? (Not a good idea if you ever want to visit that country in the future)

The claim itself might be nonsense; that's immaterial. You're faced with a Hobson's choice if said contractor drags you to court.

(Addendum: this is why I made the point that labor law is local. When you hire a national of a foreign country, in general, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the courts of that country for labor related disputes.

I am not sure if a clause in an employment contract stating that the agreement is governed by U.S. law would be accepted by a local court; and even if it did, in litigation, you'd most likely have to represent yourself before the local court to make that objection.)

redcobra762
1 replies
10h47m

You don’t fire contractors, their contract just ends. Additionally, the contract is often with the company, not the individual, so their employees aren’t in any legal sense working “for” you. If an employee wants to litigate, they’re opposing the contracting company, not you.

This comes with some downsides of its own, but generally this circumvents most labor issues. And of course anyone can sue for any reason, but if the argument is that the individual will pester you with lawsuits, can’t anyone do that to anyone else about anything?

npsomaratna
0 replies
10h43m

Fair enough, yes. If you're contracting with a third-party company that takes up the risk of hiring the employee, that does circumvent these issues.

Re: the lawsuits—yes, the barrier to initiate litigation is low (in most countries); but in my experience, most folks only start litigation when they feel significantly wronged.

Problem is, given the difference in cultures (something you pointed out earlier), an act by the company that is perfectly standard in the U.S. might be interpreted very differently by someone from another country.

lemme_tell_ya
0 replies
11h39m

I work for a small tech company in the US (~25 employees) and a few of them are in Europe. My boss didn't seem to have any issue hiring them and he wears a lot of hats, and we didn't hire them due to cost but to their very specific expertise.

mlrtime
1 replies
5h9m

This topic keeps coming up when remote work is discussed and I think a lot of commenters are showing their age.

Off Shoring is not new. I managed a team of 7 Indains (6 dev, 2 QA) in Hyderabad as contract workers (not company employees) in 2007, 17 years ago! Before zoom, slack, meet, teams.

They were great at what they did, they were cheaper than 8 US employees, but the relationship definitely had pros/cons that are not easily understood.

The biggest pro was actually the timezone, I could ask for fixes/features and when I came into the office in the morning they'd be done. The cons were many, including quality of work and efficiency.

__loam
0 replies
19m

Totally understand offshoring went out of fashion prior to remote work and Covid. I'd be curious to know how management is evaluating that post Covid. I have to imagine many of them didn't learn their lesson, and I also imagine the quality of software engineers outside the US has risen in the meantime.

esafak
1 replies
10h50m

One consideration that helps local workers is the time zone; a remote company may yet choose to hire locally to reduce the time zone span.

Another is communication; companies want to hire people that can communicate fluently in a shared language.

But the best solution is to just become better at your job. The best programmers are all in the US, so it is easier to learn from them and join their ranks. If you are no better than the competition, then a company is justified in hiring in the cheaper labor.

ssl-3
0 replies
8h2m

In a vacuum, both of those first two considerations are easily resolved by hiring even more remote workers from an area with low pay (and low cost of living), and who share similar timezones and primary language.

But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.

(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)

prmoustache
0 replies
9h35m

If it could smoothen the inequalities between countries (and even within a country) in term of income, real estate/education/healthcare prices, I am all for it.

lemme_tell_ya
0 replies
11h41m

We started down this path before COVID, it's just accelerating now.

I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.

[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.

jimt1234
10 replies
10h56m

How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.

coldpie
3 replies
3h58m

How could remote work not be more productive?

When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.

(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)

Seacant
1 replies
3h6m

This mirrors the issue I had with work from home to a tee. During the pandemic, as soon as it was safe, I went into a ghost town of an office right up until they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home. I was eventually able to find that coffee shops filled a similar function for me, and now spend a majority of my productive workday at one.

(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)

coldpie
0 replies
2h18m

they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home

I do think about this. I think my current workplace office has enough people that this isn't likely, but if they did get rid of it, I guess I'd try to find some co-working facility and see how that feels. More likely though, I'd quit and find some other job that does have a local office.

RGamma
0 replies
3h18m

We have a system where we clock in and out. This reduces the situation to "be clocked in when you work and clocked out otherwise" which is easy to handle psychologically.

So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.

And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.

Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.

stronglikedan
1 replies
2h43m

How could remote work not be more productive?

I live 10 minutes from my office, and there are much, much fewer distractions there. Anecdotal of course, but it's one way to answer your question.

steveBK123
0 replies
2h28m

To me this is almost like internal vs external locus of control stuff.

I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.

In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).

prmoustache
0 replies
9h45m

I think regardless of where you work there is an upper limit in time you actually are productive during a day and it is way way below 8 hours. Usually I do more in the first 2 hours of my shift than I do during the remaining 6 hours. Others might be more productive at different time of day depending on their own internal clock. We just can't be 100% focused on hour work and uninterrupted for so many hours.

Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.

helboi4
0 replies
6h21m

No I don't want to work if i never see human beings, i have no connection to my team and I'm deeply depressed because I am a young single person who doesn't have a family waiting for me at home

bearjaws
0 replies
4h7m

I think were at the point in capitalism (late stage corporatism?) that employees are more or less going to capture 'excess productivity' for themselves by doing chores and running errands. Same goes for the office, they will go around and gossip, several long trips to the break room and walks.

Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.

It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.

Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.

BlackFly
0 replies
6h3m

Then your friends should reflect a bit. This study shows that there isn't a positive nor negative effect. If your friends are working additional hours each day when they work from home and they are representative of this study, then they are working more time to be as productive as they used to be.

If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.

2d8a875f-39a2-4
10 replies
12h4m

It was never about productivity. It was about power and control. And commercial real estate investments.

reducesuffering
6 replies
11h7m

Please tell us how you’re so certain companies that have productivity affecting their $1T net worth are more concerned with their $5b real estate.

Please don’t let it be that a VP is manipulating productivity numbers so that their drop in the bucket action will move the price of their SFH they own.

dymk
5 replies
11h2m

The commercial real estate market is a lot bigger than $5B.

reducesuffering
4 replies
10h58m

But FAANG doesn’t care about the commercial real estate market, so why would they make any decisions based on it?

gnz11
2 replies
7h13m

Why single out FAANG? FAANG companies aren’t the only ones pushing RTO. The study analyzed 43 different industries.

reducesuffering
1 replies
4h52m

FAANG are the best case scenario for your argument, with billion dollar real estate portfolios and more RTO-heavy. Just because this study reached a conclusion doesn’t mean that it’s the same conclusion other companies’ reach. Especially when those companies’ have their bottom line at stake, “skin in the game.”

Again, by what plausible incentive do you think non-FAANG companies, with tiny real estate assets, usually leases for a multi-billion company, would impact their productivity for tiny help in the overall real estate market?

2d8a875f-39a2-4
0 replies
3h29m

I admit I was being a bit flippant. But there's a case to be made from the "same people owning all the companies" argument that the investors in all these tech companies are also invested in commercial real estate returns. So basically it's Larry Fink who wants you back in the office, and hey he owns your co so the board will listen to him (being flippant again here).

e_i_pi_2
0 replies
4h34m

Not at FAANG - but my company was scaling up and bought a much larger office space right before covid, so a lot of the push does seem to be "We just spent a bunch of money on this and need to justify it to investors, it looks bad when they come in and the office in 90% empty desks"

YetAnotherNick
2 replies
11h25m

How is this about real state investment?

scaryclam
0 replies
2h20m

This is something that gets trotted out every time this topic comes up. It's got little to do with the actual conversation, and it only relevant to some companies.

Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.

If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.

e_i_pi_2
0 replies
4h37m

If you own a big office building and companies don't need as much office space then you can't charge as much for rent, and the property loses value. Similar to how online shopping has led to a bunch of malls closing down

mouzogu
7 replies
13h50m

layoffs are mostly done.

so the media is starting to lay the foundation for offshoring of jobs to remote, cheaper locations.

yedava
4 replies
13h40m

Offshoring has been a thing for a few decades now. So has the technology that facilitates remote work. So I don't think this is some new push for offshoring.

randomdata
3 replies
13h18m

In fairness, there does seem to be a lot of concern amongst the management class around keeping their jobs if they don't get back into the office.

Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.

13of40
2 replies
12h40m

My two cents on that last bit: I have a team of people working in the US, more than half of them from India, and another team actually in India. Culturally there's a fair amount of overlap, but the real ball buster is the timezone difference. There's no way to both get regular face time and have everyone work normal hours.

prmoustache
1 replies
9h33m

On the other hands this is interesting for sys/cloud admins/ops workers.

With colleagues in different timezones you can say goodbye to on-call shifts and being woken up in the middle of the night for issues. An indian or euro colleague can do maintenance stuff on infra used by US developers and customers and the US ones can do the same for indian/euro facing ones. All this without the fatigue and risk of mistakes that comes with working very late into the night or early in the morning.

I've worked in a team with indian, euro and us workers and we could find a way to get meetings because indian people do not usually know how to say No. So they tend to stay later than us euro guys and we would have most of our meetings in a short window in early evening (India) / afternoon (Europe) / morning (USA). Actually that was a good thing because it meant most of our calls would be concentrated in that same time window so you could focus on actual work the rest of the day instead of having calls spread out over a full day of work and lots of interruptions / context switches.

mlrtime
0 replies
5h7m

Counterpoint, we have a team where 1 person is in India. 100% of our oncall issues happen during US hours. This person is not on the oncall rotation because of the timzone issue.

mc32
0 replies
13h46m

Maybe Jeff (or Mike) can kickstart offshoring journalists for the Washpost. (or B’berg) See how they like them apples.

TheCapeGreek
0 replies
12h16m

Maybe?

I'm in one of these offshoring countries (South Africa). All I've seen lately is a ton of remote jobs are now limiting themselves to remote within the country or region, not even timezone-aligned. Hard to find EU/UK remote work that doesn't lock me out. I see the same with US-only remote work.

The result is also that local salaries have started going down again, in spite of the high inflation. There's no pressure anymore to pay better, when the foreign companies with real money aren't buying your employees anymore.

Not saying it's all completely dead and no companies are hiring abroad to here, but right this second, the remote dream seems to be shrinking. If anything the offshoring will be more traditional with setting up office in the locale and paying local salaries.

falsandtru
5 replies
11h28m

The fact that productivity did not increase would also mean that few people used the freed up commuting time to improve their skills. Anybody here?

denvrede
3 replies
11h7m

I now have more time that I can spend with daughter, so I guess I may improved my parenting skill?

IMO it's also totally fine to use that freed up time to just get a break from... anything. No need to be after self-improvement all the time.

falsandtru
2 replies
10h59m

That's a right incentive for workers, but what is needed here for workers is an incentive for companies to expand remote work.

prmoustache
0 replies
9h38m

I don't know about productivity but the quality of my work is better, and I am a much more sociable person when I am happy and awake than when I am draggy my ass, still sleepy to an office.

I think that should be enough for any company.

charlieyu1
0 replies
7h27m

Employee retention

ssl-3
0 replies
8h17m

That's an interesting perspective.

I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.

And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.

And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?

Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?

Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?

And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.

But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.

Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.

(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?

Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.

Mouse wigglers, anyone?)

Eridrus
5 replies
13h35m

The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.

This does not seem like a very strong study.

williamcotton
4 replies
13h33m

Why?

hugh-avherald
2 replies
13h16m

To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.

viraptor
1 replies
13h1m

Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.

ororroro
0 replies
11h51m

The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.

They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.

Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.

Eridrus
0 replies
1h28m

I thought this would be obvious, but making up some assumptions about industry-level adoption of remote work based on the composition of employees and then seeing if those industries broke from their pre-pandemic trends requires companies to mechanically adopt WFH policies regardless of whether they are good or not (somewhat reasonable during the peak of covid, but not really for much long after, and also requires the timing of those shocks to line up) and then also needs that shock to be so big that you can see it at the industry level, separate from the general covid shock, and then also risks finding incorrect impacts because covid unsurprisingly had industry-specific effects.

Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.

This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.

jvmboi
4 replies
8h33m

I am fully remote and have been for a long time but I don't trust productivity studies, especially if they just find what everyone wants to hear anyway.

If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.

kraftman
0 replies
8h17m

If that were the case, it seems like it wouldnt have taken covid to tip the balance so much, and it would have tipped back much more quickly. I've never worked at a company that would come anywhere being classed as optimizing for productivity, there has always been a huge amount of wasted time and resources.

knallfrosch
0 replies
4h10m

Yeah, measuring productivity is a complex topic. You probably don't even know the productivity yourself, or by story points or whatever.

But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.

advael
0 replies
8h22m

I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity."

Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.

To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.

BeFlatXIII
0 replies
1h41m

If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity.

Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.

andyish
4 replies
2h8m

I'm genuinely surprised that your typical exec isn't looking at things like this thinking: "We're spending this much a month on office space for our 500 staff at this location. Let's knock that down to 100 and push everyone to work from home". Give ourselves a big pat on the back and a nice bonus for saving a few million a year.

If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.

In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.

admax88qqq
1 replies
2h0m

If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.

Isn't this what they did?

It's been a few years since the big shift to WFH and some execs think it's not working and are pushing for return to office.

Don't get me wrong, I think the reality of WFH is a lot more nuanced than the public debate is making it seem, it works for some and not for others.

But if the typical exec was to do what you are proposing, I feel like the visible affects to us would be exactly what we're already seeing.

mk89
0 replies
1h39m

It's a bit more complicated than that I think.

In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.

They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.

Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).

throwup238
0 replies
2h2m

The typical exec's tenure is shorter than the six year office leases so they'd never see any praise or bonus for making that change. As far as they're concerned, the option doesn't exist.

sam0x17
0 replies
1h59m

Startups DEFINITELY have been looking at it this way for the last decade, to the point where I only know of a few startups that still have physical offices out of the hundreds I interact with in various capacities.

Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...

Roark66
4 replies
11h45m

People are different. For some it really increases productivity and wellbeing. For others the opposite. I'm not surprised it is about the same on average as measured by work output.

I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.

denvrede
2 replies
11h1m

Working remote showed me how much I value direct interaction with people. For me, and I spoke to a lot of people for whom it's the same, the sweet spot is a hybrid model. Three days remote, two days on-site. Sometimes the other way round, depends on the tasks for the week.

If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks. That being said, I also will never work 100% on-site again, only if I can walk to work, which given my location, will not happen in the near future.

xur17
0 replies
8h1m

If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks.

I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).

charlieyu1
0 replies
7h31m

I'm completely opposite, so much energy wasted dealing with people. Just give me the requirements, only contact me for technical reasons please. I'm not a social animal, I work to collect my salary to pay bills, full stop. Less contacts means better work quality because I'm not wasting my energy somewhere else.

knallfrosch
0 replies
4h15m

I will hopefully soon join an on-site only work place with the pre-2015 exception for the plumber visit. Don't really like being at home all the time, what do I talk to my wife about then?

Then again, I do choose jobs where I don't commute 3 hours into SF. More like 30 minutes, preferably by bike rather than car (location:Europe)

khalid_canada
3 replies
13h3m

As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely.

In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.

redcobra762
0 replies
11h35m

This is the problem; for “focus” work, perhaps. But as a TPM, you know that not all work is “focus work”, and the “collaborative work” suffers when done remotely. You also know that even “focus” work doesn’t make up even one whole job that someone can do without any “collaboration”.

The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.

lemme_tell_ya
0 replies
11h50m

I know I am more productive for sure. I started working remotely in 2017, but I wasn't allowed to jump right into it. I had an agreement with my manager and I started doing one day remote a week, then two, and eventually built up to fully remote, and eventually even working remotely from all over the world. But it wasn't overnight, I had to build that trust.

I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.

forinti
0 replies
8h1m

I manage a small (understaffed) team and we managed wonders during the pandemic. Other teams in our company also kept producing like crazy.

Now that we are forced back into the office, morale is crashing.

biscuit1v9
3 replies
12h54m

And while many US companies have been pushing employees to return to the office

I still don't see the reason why you should go to office if you do your work just right.

There are more expenses if you go to office rather than being remote.

lumost
0 replies
12h48m

I recently went RTO in a major metro, the post tax hit was between 10-15k USD, I was fortunate to already own a home near enough to my office. The majority of which comes from parking, and lunch.

Pre-pandemic you didn’t really notice these things, but it adds up fast.

jansan
0 replies
10h56m

Work is not only getting a task done. It also involves helping struggling or new colleagues. How does "learning on the job" even look like with remote work? When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler. This does not happen with remote work and there is nothing to compensate for this.

deelowe
0 replies
12h49m

Depends, did you get a sweet tax deal for locating your HQ with the implicit understanding that putting the HQ there would drive tax revenue back to the city? Did you tell your friends and top investors of this decision and did they purchase real estate in the area with the implicit understanding that they'd be landlords for your new HQ?

Work from home is a cost savings companies so it would seem they'd be motivated to downsize office space, but this isn't what's happening. In a world where costs are always the highest priority, I'm not buying the culture/work ethic argument.

arein3
3 replies
6h41m

Based on my experience working in IT on complex projects, it is better to work together in the same room/office, if you have a team that is not all seniors and if you work on a greenfield project where you have a lot of structure to put in place.

Often with people that are doing something new to them, they might have a "mental barrier" of doing something new, because there are a lot of things to take into account, and discussing with somebody experienced in person helps more that having a video call.

Also making some architectural decisions might take a lot of time if there are multiple potential solutions, each with pros and cons (ex. which message broker / http client / log & metric aggregator / sql database to pick). Being in the same room, a few senior developers and possibly the infrastructure guy makes it easier.

When working on already launched projects, the architecture is already in place and doing maintenance or adding new features does not need a lot of communication/synchronization between team members, so doing that remotely is not an issue. However it might be if you are not familiar with the project, or don't have experience, or you have associates in the team and you need good performance from them.

I don't know if it's the same when working on simpler projects.

gumballindie
2 replies
6h17m

IT on complex projects, it is better to work together in the same room/office

I guess it depends. If the most “complex IT projects” out there can work without ever meeting in person so can your team.

maigret
0 replies
6h6m

Which ones?

arein3
0 replies
5h18m

Depends from case to case. It might be a complex project, but the lead/architect already has the right answers and there will be smooth sailing. On the contrary it might be a project with constantly changing requirements, new portions of tech stack for all the team, tight deadlines, some tool chosen for a task does not support something, bugs, estimations did not meet reality. In that case (a challenging project) I would prefer the team in the office.

Also if you are a begginer, I would recommend to search for work in office if it works for you.

I dislike commuting more than half an hour, however I would like the team to be together if it's something challenging.

I know it is hard to commute long time, especially if you have other responsibilities, but that does't change my opinion on what is the best for the team.

redcobra762
2 replies
11h39m

I’ve said this before, but if productivity isn’t lost, it’s at the expense of a very overworked manager, in companies that weren’t built remote-first, and don’t operate primarily remotely.

This is a more complex issue than simply measuring work output of one person and comparing it to their work output in different locations.

For my wife, it is objectively false to claim that remote work is better for her teams, in her specific situation.

mtlguitarist
1 replies
6h41m

I really do not understand what could possibly be hard about it for the manager here. People have tickets in some issue tracker, they move them into whatever status they're in, and the manager just sends out some messages to check in on the status if there haven't been new updates in a few days. Yeah, you also have 1-1s, status meetings, performance reviews, etc but these are all things you'd have anyway. My managers have done basically nothing different for me while I was remote and everything seemed to be fine.

redcobra762
0 replies
2h3m

And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place? How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group? How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it? And god forbid somewhere have a job that isn’t software engineering…

Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.

LightBug1
2 replies
3h23m

Jebus ... this is still being debated?

Can we just acknowledge the complete an utter failure of managegment around this debate (I am management, btw) such that we can't settle this one fair and square.

We all have expectations and results from individuals. It doesn't take a Fed study to answer the question around an employees productivity. Either it's better, the same, or worse.

I'm all for remote and hybrid work. Manage by results and what's the issue? Super strange. Get together every so often to catchup, do the human thing.

I've had anecdotal evidence of firms falling behind because so many talented employees tell them where to go when flexibility isn't an option.

Hold the line.

sokoloff
1 replies
3h18m

My hypothesis is that the debate is difficult because of some mix of difficulty in precisely measuring productivity (which everyone can see) and in the mix of most tasks which work 100% fine remotely and some tasks that work better in-person ("the human thing").

(I'm also management and very much pro-remote.)

LightBug1
0 replies
2h1m

Agreed. It's just so clear to me that role(s) flex between those set of tasks as need be ... and that should be clear to both manager and managed ...

The manager shouldn't be a control freak about being in the office 5 days a week ... and the managed shouldn't be a whiny baby when asked to come do some human stuff ... somewhere in the middle is the promised land and it should't be that hard to find.

Having said that ... I had an experience with a colleague recently that reminded that not much of this is based on reason.

whywhywhywhy
1 replies
1h25m

Does it matter? If the company wants you in the office just don't work there, the people who want to work in the office can work at those companies and the people who want remote can work remote companies. Then we're all happy.

Only causes issues when remote people demand to be able to do it at companies that value in person working. Studies are irrelevant because at the end of the day you'll never change peoples minds.

Fire-Dragon-DoL
0 replies
1h22m

The problem is here because companies saying "we now support remote workers" changed their mind and threw remote workers away

paulus_magnus2
1 replies
3h3m

WFH is an invention equal to washingmachine + dishwasher where 2h each day is not being lost anymore by unproductive activity. With plenty of externalities on top of the lost time.

If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.

gtirloni
0 replies
2h49m

This is something governments with an interest in protecting employee wellbeing could step in.

The employer pays for the time you're engaged in working AND trying to work by commuting. That 10-15h/week would, as you say, show up pretty quickly in reports.

But incentives are tricky. I can imagine companies would add the requirement that you live 10min from work because they only have budget for that much time spent on transportation costs. Like with RTO, that would backfire but I'm sure companies would insist on that instead of remote work.

ycombinete
0 replies
11h0m

Now do one for people with ADHD

thunfisch
0 replies
12h15m

Does anyone have the link to the study? I'm tired of news articles referencing and summarizing their interpretation of a study, without giving me the option to validate the claims made.

tamimio
0 replies
1h38m

And we all knew this from the day one, it’s just middle management feeling the need to have someone around to breathe around their shoulders and boss them around, and the C-level pushed by the commercial landlords because it’s all about their benefit.

ssijak
0 replies
3h1m

If working from home for all the jobs that do not require physical presence (building a building on a location for example) was a right by law, I can imagine centralisation in big cities reversing and a lot of interesting smaller communities starting to flourish more. Which in my opinion is a great thing.

sigzero
0 replies
36m

There is no real "connection" being made with remote work. That is something I miss.

say_it_as_it_is
0 replies
6h50m

Productivity is one factor. You also have to consider getting away from people at home, joining people because you live alone, sexual pursuits, and other topics that people are dishonest about yet are largely motivated by to work in office. People think RTO is about real estate, but it's really about executives looking for extramarital affairs.

rcbdev
0 replies
2h27m

With the entire commute debate being what it is I will just point out that in Austria there has been somewhat of a solution to this for a long time now - it's called the "Pendlerpauschale" (commuter's flat rate).

If you live far enough away from your employee (20km+) you are entitled to an added monthly bonus to your salary - depending on your estimated commute time.

okokwhatever
0 replies
4h11m

Oh God... here we go again...

nutshell89
0 replies
3h35m

The Fed study mentioned in the Bloomberg article: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

neonate
0 replies
13h58m
maxehmookau
0 replies
6h38m

I've been working remote for 5 years, so this is anecdotal.

But it's also incredibly obvious and intuitive. It relies on the right company values, the right processes and the right incentives. But when done right, this will always hold true IMO.

karmasimida
0 replies
7h44m

It doesn't confirm either ways though, not good, not bad.

heads
0 replies
12h21m

The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services…

Given the breadth of this study, two different conclusions spring to mind:

• productivity is up across the board, regardless of wfh; or

• sending the pen pushers and bean counters home and letting the shop floor people get on with their jobs made both more productive!

gumballindie
0 replies
7h8m

People advocating for on site work are people without an inner voice. They need to constantly externalise thinking.

Anyway working from home does increase productivity for the individual, improves the economy due to more disposable income, benefits the mental health of those with an inner voice, and stimulates family life.

greybeardgeek
0 replies
19m

Here's the chart. https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/el2024-02-3... Not sure if I agree with the headline as a proper summary.

givemeethekeys
0 replies
6h3m

In my opinion is that the decision to be on-site or remote should be made at the team level. A team, that can't perform well onsite won't do any better remotely and vice versa.

# How I know if a team member will perform well remotely:

- They take initiative. They take ownership. They learn how to effectively use different communication tools, and then they use them. They ask questions with the goal of solving problems. They get things done.

# How I know if a team member will perform poorly remotely:

- They wait for others to tell them what to do. They tend to disappear. They don't communicate.

- Turns out that these are shitty traits to have for onsite team members as well.

# How I know if a manager will perform well remotely:

- They would perform well as a remote team member (see above), and have a team capable of working remotely.

- They lead by example, know how to build trust, understand how to set achievable short-term goals that lead up to big longterm successes.

- When questioned during meetings, they build trust, confidence and alignment.

# Some signs that a manager will perform poorly with a remote team:

- They prefer a command and control approach to management.

- They lack respect for their team members' time, experience, capabilities and / or intelligence.

- They are unable to explain problems such the team can help solve them.

- This leads them to micromanage.

- They perceive questions during meetings as a challenge to their authority, which makes look insecure.

A micromanager will see more success from poor performing team members if they're all onsite or, as is often the case, frequently on all day conference calls. A micromanager will also quickly lose their best team members.

gdcbe
0 replies
43m

The one thing I see companies demanding onsite work never do is… commute time paid as any other work hour… sure some pay commute costs or km costs, but those are nothing worth compared to your hourly wage…

fulafel
0 replies
11h37m

Source: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

Note that when economists are talking about productivity, it's specific. It's units of output per hour worked (quantitative, not qualitative). https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/what-is-pro...

deepsquirrelnet
0 replies
1h45m

How does remote work affect commercial property values?

codie3611
0 replies
9h11m

These discussions always miss the main point. Remote work gives you the opportunity to decide what suits your life best. It enhances the possibilities a company offers. The main conflict is people trying to convince other people that their way is the right way and vice-versa. Find out what works for you and if you are better off, everyone will be better off around you too including your employer. That is why I mostly ignore these findings. I know what works for me and no study can convince me otherwise. And I know some colleagues like the office more and I'm glad they can go there.

caturopath
0 replies
3h27m

This is among those topics where I don't expect the opposite result to be reported.

booleandilemma
0 replies
4h17m

I'm not surprised. Of course people are going to say that working remotely helps them be more productive. Working remotely is nice. They're going to say whatever bullshit they can to keep doing it. Instead of arguing about whether it's' productive or not let's just call it what it is: a really nice perk.

beams_of_light
0 replies
1h28m

No, but it erodes the control executives want to exert over their workforce, along with the company's real estate values.

atleastoptimal
0 replies
9h57m

I'm just guessing but this makes sense to me

Boring email jobs where people are on their computer most of the time anyway and meetings are simply status updates, there's no reason why remote work is any worse, and likely just boosts productivity because of the mental health benefits of no commute, better environment, no distractions, etc.

In terms of jobs which require more creativity and collaborative rigor, I imagine remote work is where that element suffers.

anonyfox
0 replies
39m

lets take this at face value and assume productivity is equal no matter if in-office or remotely.

now thinking in business terms. you can run a (remote compatible) company without having an office at all, which may reduce cost very significantly, giving you an economic advantage. being a remote company also forces everyone to exchange thoughts/data/documents digitally one way or the other, making automation ideas with AI tools more feasible, which would then be another economic advantage that still needs to be realized in the future but its there.

now add ontop that people don't waste their time and pollute the environment by commuting, that employees can live wherever they want (probably: way cheaper and with higher QoL) than in commute distance, so they have more money left each month to spend (instead of it going to insane rent/...), which stimulates the economy in theory.

not going into the discussion that some people actually like to be in the office with others, basically forcing everyone else to do the same indirectly or directly. just the pure economic advantages. did I miss something that counters my points?

Sparkyte
0 replies
13h36m

Almost as if people can be more productive working remotely because they are not anchored by a geographical location.

Nikolas000
0 replies
2h42m

Link to the original research article (by SF Fed researchers) https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

LtdJorge
0 replies
30m

It really does, I find it close to imposible to concentrate in an office, having to blast music through the earphones so I stop hearing everyone and every movement they do.

It mostly has to do with ADHD (without the H really), but it's a valid effect.

KorematsuFredt
0 replies
1h27m

I trust actual companies over Fed data any ways.

Kon5ole
0 replies
10h42m

How is productivity measured in the kinds of jobs that can be done from home?

For manufacturing it's easy - just measure the output per day and number of working hours spent. But how is it done for finance, marketing, software development, creative work and such where the output is either limited (you don't need more financial reporting than last month) or is entirely different in scope and complexity every time?

If productivity could be objectively measured it seems to me it would be easy to determine objectively whether WFH is better or worse, but the discussion seems to be mostly based on personal opinions. Some feel that workers must be slacking off at home, some feel that they get much more done from home.

ChrisArchitect
0 replies
5h29m

[dupe]

Some more discussion over here on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028862