Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by miroljub » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

hospitalJail wrote: post #233

vidarh wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#242

Post by j45 » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #236

mlrtime wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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.

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

#243

Post by maccard » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #191

epolanski wrote: post #173

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…

> 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?

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.

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

#244

Post by mlrtime » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

__loam wrote: post #48

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.

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.

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

#245

Post by jen20 » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

raizer88 wrote: post #135

331c8c71 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

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.

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

#246

Post by mlrtime » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #133

13of40 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 tha…

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.

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

#247

Post by jen20 » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

lynx23 wrote: post #172

randomdata wrote: post #7

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#248

Post by icedchai » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

jack_riminton wrote: post #182

blagie wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

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.

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.

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

#249

Post by tomoyoirl » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:27 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #236

mlrtime wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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

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

#250

Post by wegfawefgawefg » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #215

intended wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.