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Working from home is powering productivity

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Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#231
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.

> real-estate value Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.

Local tax benefits is the exception, not the norm. Just because 1% of the companies get that for 1% of the location, it doesn't prove 90% of the companies have WFH policy.

And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.

Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low). The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs w…

It's all guesswork until we start measuring the impact of interruptions in open plan offices vs. homes (which is going to vary with families).

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference. For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.

> no one watching over your shoulders That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices. I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well. I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manife…

The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#234

I am literally at least 10x when I work from home. I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking. Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop. I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives. I l…

A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.

A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.

Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.

I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#235
post #153

It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…

The issue seems to be less about wfh or not. It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.

“Company culture”… that’s the word they use for sure. Often it’s ego, sunk cost fallacies and other things that have to do with the culture in the C suite for sure. Pay people well and treat them with respect and you’ll end up with good and loyal employees, as always.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#237

I am literally at least 10x when I work from home. I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking. Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop. I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives. I l…

Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)

But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#238

It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…

It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#239
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication? (in my indus…

There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings. That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.

Funny enough, those of us who had to deal with international teams or offshoring had to develop those skills even before remote-first companies were a thing.

I remember some of my colleagues were working in an office doing WebEx or whatever it was calls all day already back in the early 2010s.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#240

It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…

Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.

Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.

“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.

And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.

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