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

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 597 posts

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

#491

Post by coldpie »

hospitalJail wrote: post #488
coldpie wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this thread, hospitalJail discovers that some people enjoy leaving their basement :)

STRAWMAN Flag this. No one is arguging for isolation I love to go to the park with my kids. I love going to parties. I don't like sitting in my car unpaid to do work that doesnt require sitting in the car unpaid.

I was explaining to someone why I enjoy my commute. It's totally OK if you don't enjoy yours! I would also hate having to sit in a car! People are different and have different situations and that's OK.

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

#492

Post by coldpie »

askonomm wrote: post #479
coldpie wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the most institutionalized-minded answer I have seen.

I don't know what this means, sorry.

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

#493

Post by iamthirsty »

pompino wrote: post #456
steveBK123 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It has to be a mix. If I only encouraged my employees at what their good at, and never pushed them to get better in areas they're lacking, things would go down-hill over time.

It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.

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

#494

Post by steveBK123 »

wharvle wrote: post #473
steveBK123 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean having 3 layers of management do a drive-by at developer desks in the space of a day, with conflicting asks is bad? Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time?? It's u…

I sometimes wonder if all the time spent inputing and tracking various not-naturally-generated "metrics" is worth it. Manager and executive hours analyzing this stuff and devising systems for it and arguing over which systems to use and crafting mandates and plans, can be extremely expensive. Expensive ICs like programmers can easily lose 10-20% of their time to task-tracking and time-tracking and shepherding various…

Yes, and often the management instituting such granular tracking systems are also the people who want to go outside it for their own "quick asks".

It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases.

Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics.

You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.

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

#495

Post by noitpmeder »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #424
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #423

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 min…

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

Then it seems you should leave and find another job if remote work is one of your priorities.

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

#496

Post by meindnoch »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #345
meindnoch wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>5 to 6 hours of standing meetings Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive .

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.

Lol. Employees tend to consistently agree with their boss. I wonder why...

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

#497

Post by BeetleB »

hnbad wrote: post #434
BeetleB wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father) Not much of an outlier.

In this economy? Maybe not in your income bracket.

Based on the data on this page[1] on households with kids:

57% have both parents working full time

28% have one parent working full time and the other not working at all.

The remaining 16% is one full time, one part time.

As another commenter pointed out - while not the majority, it's definitely not an outlier.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...

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

#498

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

noitpmeder wrote: post #495
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then it seems you should leave and find another job if remote work is one of your priorities.

Of course, I'm just saying this is how the problem was born: remote workers were going to remote companies, than the remote companies flipped over and messed up remote workers lives. As a remote worker you should go to a remote company

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

#499

Post by RestlessMind »

tomtheelder wrote: post #486
RestlessMind wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We need to keep in mind the framing of this- it’s a discussion about commuting vs wfh. In the universe of locations where that’s a serious conversation the US is an outlier in terms of poor public transit.

Don't you think Indians too have serious discussions about commuting vs wfh? Now I am asking this seriously - what bubble are you living in if you think that topic doesn't pertain to people in developing countries?

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

#500

Post by RestlessMind »

tomtheelder wrote: post #487
RestlessMind wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

I think it was obvious what they meant given context.

I don't think it is that obvious. HN is a global platform after all.
Post reply on HN