Working from home is powering productivity • Hacker News Board

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#401

Post by greentxt » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

noch wrote: post #383

benterix wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry you've had bad experiences. No, actually I haven't. I just have many colleagues who share their feelings with me. In my niche, all best-paid positions are remote only, I basically cooperate with teams from different continents, it's very rewarding. If someone tried to offer me a job forcing me to sit in an open plan office, I would laugh in their face, it seems so ridiculously absurd and unnecessary. The…

> No, actually I haven't. Ah. Well, second hand anecdotes are certainly appreciated. Thanks for sharing. > The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek. Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "kn…

>As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?

I would guess having employees that feel valued for their productivity and contributions would be what is best for the business, no?

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#402

Post by steveBK123 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

mattpallissard wrote: post #392

steveBK123 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC. For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it. For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have…

I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned. You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked. It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a…

Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus.

For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.

They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.

Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#403

Post by Unbeliever69 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #260

I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow. For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interact…

I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#404

Post by steelframe » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

Sometimes politics comes into play at the office. "This is the decision. We're just informing you about it because we agreed in our informal hallway chat that it's the right thing to do."

Suddenly all of the doc comments and Slack threads become meaningless and are swept aside in favor of the consensus that a few people came to face-to-face. Remote employees will never be as politically effective as the employees in the hallway.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#405

Post by simonbarker87 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

_gabe_ wrote: post #391

simonbarker87 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person. We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years? I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.

I really don’t understand what you’re saying here. Letters have existed for literally thousands of years at this point and people were able to communicate effectively through that. Several countries were founded and destroyed with coordination through written communication. I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last…

Perhaps they still study those letters due to the ambiguity in understanding of what those people meant?

We also don’t know that they understood each other as effectively as they would have if they communicated verbally in person.

It is far easier to understand someone’s true meaning in person thanks to tone and body language. Communication in person is quicker because typing/writing is slow. That speed allows for faster ideation and iteration.

It’s not impossible to communicate in written form at all but I don’t believe it’s as effective.

To your first point, we write more emails, more DMs, more online comments, more text messages etc than ever before. We clearly communicate more in written form now than at any point in history.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#406

Post by ajuc » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:37 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #400

ajuc wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom This works as an argument against 8h work day and 5-day work week too. Ultimately if something is better for the society (and WFH obviously is - commute time, carbon footprint, land prices, housing crisis - it helps with almost everything) - we should just force companies to use it by regulation, so that there's no "race" in that regard cause the conditions are the sam…

I agree that WFH is better for society, but anecdotally, it probably caused more of a housing crisis here in CA. Folks took their bay area salaries and moved to cheaper suburbs and totally wrecked the RE market. And I have read stories of similar things happening in other places that techies flocked to, like Austin, though I don't think it's necessarily fair to blame that on remote work because there were other facto…

> Folks took their bay area salaries and moved to cheaper suburbs and totally wrecked the RE market.

Isn't that what we want? Land prices averaging out? Then we can build where it's cheaper so more people have homes (with access to good jobs).

It probably won't be limited to suburbs, if you can WFH from the same state - you can WFH from another state.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#407

Post by arp242 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:53 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #152

notyourwork wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t follow the male, female, disabled person argument at all.

The canonical example would be it's hard to have a serendipitous conversation with your male colleagues in the mens restroom if you're female. That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the…

No one is having serious conversations in the restroom. That would be profoundly bizarre and weird.

And most people aren't saying that serendipitous conversations spur great big innovations or "aha!" moments, but rather that it just makes the process easier. Or that they prefer it. If yours are different then fine, but don't be so dismissive of other people's experiences and preferences.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#408

Post by arp242 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #373

DrBazza wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few. On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones. One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot expl…

> 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Unsure if you're attributing it to Feynman (although I do see the relationship in Feynman's thought process, but the quote is from Einstein: > If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. ... buuut really it's from Nicolas Boileau (1674): > Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement. Et les mots p…

It's the sort of thing that's probably been coined/phrased independently dozens of times over the centuries.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#409

Post by greentxt » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

Wfh is better but going out to lunch, the whole notion of a lunch break, or everyone eating at about the same time everyday is something I miss about offices.

Offices are also like the schools we grow up in. There's a continuity through life that's been lost.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#410

Post by dalyons » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 3:20 PM UTC

solidasparagus wrote: post #252

dalyons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an open secret that there is no data that supports RTO. If there was, at even one company, it would be screamed from the rooftops. (I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)

It's an open secret that we have no idea how to actually measure tech company productivity. That's why there isn't and will not be clear evidence for or against RTO. Best you can do is pick a narrow enough sliver that it is measurable. Then claim it is the "important" view and wow, what a shock, the data supports your position!

I agree on an individual level, but at a company level it’s fairly easy to measure things like product feature shipping velocity, change in business metrics like growth etc. When you’re talking about company wide changes like RTO it would theoretically show up in these core metrics.