Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

nbloom.people.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 570 posts

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#271

Post by toomanybeersies »

croutonwagon wrote: post #4

The problem is multi-faceted. While this is entirely anecdotal I have observed a LOT of time theft by employees. And been asked more than ever to investigate employee behavior (even when I normally try and advise against the approach) Some more egregious than others. While most probably aren’t going to awol for a day at a time I know a LOT of people that now spend working hours doing leisure things. Maybe that’s a su…

> But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.

That seems entirely reasonable to me. If I've been asked something by a coworker and for whatever reason I believe that they're AFK/offline, then responding to their message/email is going to be a lower priority for me.

I'm not going to stop whatever I'm in the middle of doing to give an immediate response if whoever asked me isn't going to read it immediately. I'll finish what I'm working on, or reply when I'm taking a break.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#272

Post by bfdm »

supercon wrote: post #268
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

I've been 100% remote and run remote teams since 2014 and I promise that it won't stick for the broader society. Here's why: 1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections. 2. Managers like to be able to watch th…

> 3. The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding. While working from home, I’ve found it much harder to switch between work/free modes. It seems the daily commute has been an effective way to for me to either prepare for the coming day or settle my mind for non-work related activities.

I've found some success in replacing that with similar routines, for example walking the dog before and after work. It's a pseudo-commute that allows similar mental preparation/release.

This worked well pre-covid. Since covid hit ...overall I'm struggling with bleeding boundaries. The pandemic anxiety makes it hard for me to settle in my basement office, so I use other spaces around the house.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#273

Post by idownvoted »

As it already was established, that most social distancing as well as most Work-From-Home (WFH) are being done by High Income Earners (HIE), one can read the papers results quite differently:

Yes, Quarantine measures propulsed WFH. But only for those which jobs allow it. Also: The rate of „investments in physical and human capital enabling WFH“ will be highly aligned with HEIs and will be much lower per worker the lower you get in the income scale (worse connection, worse hardware, worse software, more requirements to keep minuscule track of working hours).

So

a) these „investements“ are either done or will compound for HIEs

b) income disparities are being increased massively

c) the low-income end of WFH will suck significantly more than the high-income end. And maybe even worse in terms of pay and conditions than the offline version of same job (more ability for bosses to micro-manage, commoditize and near-shore you).

„Third, many workers report being more productive at home“

d) again, this will highly concentrate around HIEs, because HIEs will be more likely to bring the most important „investment in WFH“ with them: Office Space at home.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#274

Post by Falkon1313 »

rmk wrote: post #225
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

I've been 100% remote and run remote teams since 2014 and I promise that it won't stick for the broader society. Here's why: 1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections. 2. Managers like to be able to watch th…

I think this paper, and survey, in general, appears to be ignoring one very important set of people: job hoppers and new entrants to the job market (to be fair, I did not read thru the entire paper, just looked over interesting sections). These two categories of people will almost certainly not prefer working from home: for job hoppers, it is difficult or in some cases, impossible to on-board; for new entrants, they…

I see this a lot "onboarding is difficult remotely", but I don't know why. It hasn't been difficult at my last few jobs including the current one where many/most of us have been remote for years.

You get added to the email lists, the slack channels, the documentation wiki, and the issue tracker. Daily meetings at 10am. You pair up with one person for a couple weeks and then somebody else and so on for the first few months. You regularly have voice and/or video chats. You get, or create, a list of who to contact with different questions or problems.

If somehow all of those communication methods fail, I doubt that just being able to add a physical touch component would help much. Other than touch, the only senses that require physical proximity are smell and taste. If you're relying on touch, smell, and taste to communicate while on-boarding people, then maybe then it might be difficult, but that also seems a bit unusual.

Mostly I think companies that have trouble with on-boarding remotely have bigger problems with their communications in general.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#275

Post by [deleted] »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

I've been 100% remote and run remote teams since 2014 and I promise that it won't stick for the broader society. Here's why: 1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections. 2. Managers like to be able to watch th…

[deleted]

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#276

Post by fredliu »

Beside the lack of social interactions between co-workers, the biggest problem of WFH for me is the difficulty for collaborative discussion, mostly due to the lack of a usable whiteboarding software that doesn't suck. Any recommendation that works for you would be really appreciated.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#277

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Bigger companies that dominate their industry and own their offices will probably return to onsite. If those buildings are really nice, as they tend to be for companies of this sort, they will really want to go back.

Companies that have a component to their office space that requires onsite work - for example manufacturing companies with an IT office somewhere on site or big media companies will probably return to onsite.

companies in which management is predominantly older might return to working onsite - supposing that more of the older management will see this last year as a deviance and working onsite a return to the normalcy they want. (obviously some older management will be able to see the possibilities but, as an old guy myself, I find that most older people are not as quick to change as I am)

companies in which a dominant force of the management would prefer to work onsite will do so. Some people like to work onsite and if they are in management you will do as management wants.

finally I know of one company that has recently had a bunch of high profile moves and are thinking it is caused by working from home and the lessening of social ties this implies.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#278

Post by kmonsen »

cco wrote: post #254
twelvechairs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this better for the company? Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff. Its a tra…

>Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers...[real dollar values] >Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure] Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and har…

Yeah, then why not fire everyone? Reduce salaries to 0, all the work is hard to measure. Or why have we all not been remote for a long time, instead of squeezed into high cost locations?

When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#279

Post by 29athrowaway »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

I've been 100% remote and run remote teams since 2014 and I promise that it won't stick for the broader society. Here's why: 1. Socializing is the primary activity that happens at work for the vast majority of workers. The gal or guy coming by your desk to "check in" or "see how your weekend was" etc... is literally where they find their social outlets and personal connections. 2. Managers like to be able to watch th…

1. I have friends outside work, I do not have an urge to socialize with people and potentially interrupting them from doing their job.

2. My manager has better things to do. Being in the office doesn't mean you are being productive. Sometimes you get distracted by noise, or some local office jerk, or some random event... e.g.: in a large company, every day is someone's birthday. Or someone wants to go for a walk and grab coffee...

3. I can live closer to the office and pay as much as twice in rent, or live farther from the office but have a larger place that my family can enjoy more, at the cost of spending more time away from home. If I work remotely, I have up to 2 extra hours every day. I can use that time sleeping, exercising, interacting with my family, cleaning, or do whatever needs to be done that is more useful than spending 2 hours stressing out in a car every day, polluting the atmosphere and congesting road infrastructure, or worrying about being mugged in a train.

4. Trying to escape from your problems won't make the situation better. You still have to go home at the end of the day and deal with your problems.

All that money wasted in a desk/cubicle/office, meeting rooms, cleaning crew, security crew, facilities crew... who do you think is paying all that money? your employer is. It's a lot of money that could rather go to something else, like your compensation, or hiring more people so you have less work to do.

If you are an engineer, offices = a lot of resources and effort put into making your life worse.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#280

Post by ianai »

phillipcarter wrote: post #261
twelvechairs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this better for the company? Yes. Key positives for a company are reduced cost of office space and ability to draw upon a wider, cheaper pool of potential workers and increased employee satisfaction (for some, not everyone prefers working from home). Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff. Its a tra…

Another big negative is the sunk cost fallacy of acquiring and/or owning office space. If you have all this space, you need to fill it with people. Ritualistic behavior isn't only exhibited by rank and file employees.

I wonder whether WFH will make work more ‘marginal value-add’ - it’s probably far easier to hire/fire someone remote than an office setting, for instance. Maybe some work will start to resemble Uber more than traditional work?
Post reply on HN