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

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

#521

Post by WheatMillington »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #39
ryanSrich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches. The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming…

I started managing a team with the “no meetings, let people do good work” philosophy and I can just say that I’m glad I was given the space as a new manager to find my feet, because I didn’t find that it worked well when taken to an extreme. Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structur…

5-6 hours a week would drive me insane, that's WAY too much.

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

#522

Post by RestlessMind »

rcbdev wrote: post #512
RestlessMind wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It stands to reason that someone who has travelled to over 60 countries would have the ability to understand what someone is trying to say without being this needlessly pedantic.

Probably we have different reasoning processes then. But this discussion is about WFH vs remote and the impact of not having to commute. It is a very pertinent topic to a lot of workers in developing countries because they too have to endure shitty commutes every day.

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

#523

Post by the_only_law »

echelon wrote: post #40
irrational wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that public school teaching, working in a nursing home, working as a social worker is meaningful, but I wouldn’t find any of those to be interesting.

Working on a startup pursuing your topic / field of interest might do the trick. There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research). There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts. Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close…

> or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).

The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.

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

#524

Post by echelon »

jdlshore wrote: post #515
echelon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one infinitesimal wake period during the age of the universe, and this sounds like making excuses to not do the thing you want to do. Rip off the band aid and feel some pain.

Already done it. I’m speaking from experience, not fear.

Sorry :(

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

#525

Post by reducesuffering »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #516
reducesuffering wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But FAANG doesn’t care about the commercial real estate market, so why would they make any decisions based on it?

FAANG as an amorphous blob of business doesn't care about commercial real estate. The very real people that make decisions at and for FAANG absolutely have concerns and interests outside of FAANG'S stock price in the decisions they make.

Be specific. I’ve already pointed out the absurdity of the case people try to make that someone with the intellect of a Google VP is fudging numbers in hopes of moving their SFH price. It’s pretty damning that there are many replies with no specifics, only vague insinuations. Ya, that’s about how well these criticisms have been thought out, of course.

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

#526

Post by pompino »

iamthirsty wrote: post #493
pompino wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well my style works for me, and your style seems like its working for you. Its quite possible we're managing completely different set of personalities. For many of the people I work with a job is just means to an end, and the concept of continuous improvement is alien to them.

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

#527

Post by nox101 »

lloeki wrote: post #122
nox101 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was o…

Our Ruby guild is ~6 ppl and counting. We are all remote, and not a single one is in the same geo. We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born. That's on…

That doesn't work for me. I want a conversation, not an announcement. My experience in chat is I post something "BTW ... " and it's crickets. Quite often no response. I feel unappreciated and like I wasted everyone's time. (maybe I did? but my experience at all previous work-from-office companies was I was well liked) Even if there is a response it may be hours later which is not what I'm looking for. It's the conversation that sparks ideas and understanding for me.

My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.

So at least for me, it doesn't work.

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

#528

Post by vidarh »

sokoloff wrote: post #520
vidarh wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence calling them suckers. Doing the commute is fine, but not taking it into account is potentially seeking yourself short(even if you end up feeling forced to take an offer you feel doesn't take it into account - at least then you're aware).

Who are these people who are competent enough to hold an engineering position but do so without taking the facts of a commute into account?

Given the low proportion of people I've extended employment offers to over the years who even try to negotiate terms or drill down into employment terms that might affect the value, I'd assume it applies to most engineers.

At some point I got a week more holiday than every other employee in the UK at my employer at the time because I was the only hire who had questioned a contract clause and gotten them to confirm my preferred interpretation of a woefully misleading clause in writing before signing, and when they later wanted to stick to the technicalities of how it was written I was able to just forward them an email from the COO confirming that in my case they'd agreed to my interpretation.

Most people seem to only pay attention to the headline amount, and then grumble about the consequences after the fact.

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

#529

Post by vidarh »

coldpie wrote: post #510
vidarh wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stops you from doing that if you work from home, so while the trip might be a benefit to you, it is entirely orthogonal from whether you work from home or an office. On the contrary, not being forced into the office let's you choose your journeys.

This nearby comment does a good job explaining why that doesn't really work out for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042945

I can't help but feel that is a rationalisation.

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

#530

Post by RamblingCTO »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #418
RamblingCTO wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good take! What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucke…

It's absolutely true that the real problem in the US is our public transit (and by extension basically all post-WW2 buildings and infrastructure) situation, but if I'm just a guy running a software company, there doesn't seem to be much I can do about that. Hence all the hand-wringing about remote work. I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for tha…

Also a very good point! We kind of have the same, in the sense that lower income brackets have tend to have a longer commute from the city limits, but in very dense cities like Frankfurt I see no real solution to that. Apart from a few "social housing" offers that need to be built on a quota for a lot of new buildings.

Texas -> Michigan is a very long way. Afaict this trend really got started with covid, where people fled to their home towns, right?

> I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work The best. I have 14 minutes by tram from door to door.

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