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

551–560 of 597 posts

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

#551

Post by ElevenLathe »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #530
ElevenLathe wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

COVID certainly was the thing that made this arrangement possible for me, though it's an open question how sustainable it is. Every all-hands for two years now has started with our CEO telling us how "energizing" it is to be back in the office. Things are a little different for us Linux weenies (sorry, I mean DevOps professionals) but I still kind of see the writing on the wall. That said, the housing situation is such (I brought enough Big City tech-job savings with me that I effectively own it outright, though rates were so low at the time that I do technically still have a mortgage) that I can now easily survive and even thrive with a nonprofessional job.

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

#552

Post by tech_tuna »

sam0x17 wrote: post #390
andyish wrote: post #379

I'm genuinely surprised that your typical exec isn't looking at things like this thinking: "We're spending this much a month on office space for our 500 staff at this location. Let's knock that down to 100 and push everyone to work from home". Give ourselves a big pat on the back and a nice bonus for saving a few million a year. If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space. I…

Startups DEFINITELY have been looking at it this way for the last decade, to the point where I only know of a few startups that still have physical offices out of the hundreds I interact with in various capacities. Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...

I have worked with/for dozens of startups. There are thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of fully remote startups.

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

#553

Post by helboi4 »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #412
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…

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…

Yep very much this. Why on earth would you choose to live somewhere that is a 3 hour commute. DOn't do that to yourself. Move. If your commute is that bad, either you're choosing a stupid place to live, or your town planning is terrible. That's the problem, not working in the office. Everyone should be able to do a few days hybrid comfortably. If you can't, you should have a job in a city closer to you.

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

#554

Post by helboi4 »

nostrebored wrote: post #326
helboi4 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in. I've never had that experience. People are always somewhat intersting and like to actually talk. There are some off days but it's never like that. And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working. I've had people never turn their cameras on. And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth,…

They don’t think about what it’s like for young people to onboard. You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore. It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market. Overall, things will shift back to in…

Yeah asking questions on slack or sth feels so much more like you're imposing on people than just saying sth out loud or shadowing someone a bit organically in person.

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

#555

Post by BeFlatXIII »

jvmboi wrote: post #533
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.

Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.

It's a shell game to increase property value to pump the nominal asset holdings of the company. "See, this office is in demand and worth $50 mil" (WFH price: $5 mil)

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

#556

Post by munksbeer »

nine_k wrote: post #341
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…

BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.

> BTW this is where commute by public transport shines.

That depends on the public transport. When I lived in London (inside what is known as the zones 1-6), I had a walk, a wait for space on a train, then stand for 40 minutes on that completely packed train, then a change at a crowded station, then another wait for space on an underground train, then stand on a completely packed underground train. All of this while dealing with angry and rude other people trying to push on each step before you. I would get to work completely stressed and in a bad mood already. That is on a good day. On a bad day the trains would just be cancelled, or the underground halted, or something and it would take hours to just get to the office.

The only way I would consider going back to something like that is for a huge, huge amount of money.

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

#557

Post by safety1st »

flappyeagle wrote: post #300
safety1st wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention. If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regard…

People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower. Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida. Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a…

This guy gets it.

Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position.

So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?)

I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to.

Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears.

Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away.

Welcome to capitalism.

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

#558

Post by arendtio »

jimt1234 wrote: post #97

How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.

Due to concepts like 'trust-based working hours' employees learn to monitor how much time they spend working. So when you get more time as an employee, you don't spend it on the company, which doesn't pay you more. Instead, you spend it somewhere else, like on your family.

I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.

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

#559

Post by Eridrus »

viraptor wrote: post #33
hugh-avherald wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.

Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.

Actually, this does not apply to good economics papers. Good economics papers have much stronger ways to identify both the independent and dependent variables using microdata from public and private sources.

Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch.

Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.

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

#560

Post by jen20 »

earthling8118 wrote: post #455
jen20 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By focusing on the word "wife" and calling it sexism you miss the point of the comment entirely. I agree with your side of the conversation but nitpicking words and throwing in an attack doesn't help the conversation.

I absolutely did not miss the point of the comment entirely, and responded to it fully, pointing out that distractions are just likely to happen in the office as at home, given the wrong set of coworkers.
Post reply on HN