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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it's a great space. There's a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There's a big stage area and the corners are furnished to be pretty cozy.

Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live/work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.

The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.

I've been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.

I've built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.

Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000's, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010's with streaming Netflix.

And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.

No ones goes to the office anymore, it's too lonely.

View on HN

> The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.

Isn't that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It's not like they're helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home.

> I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.

I'm glad that's working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.

> the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.

I totally get this sentiment but for me it's really nice to choose crazy work hours if I want them.

True; if I didn't have the kid, I would love, love, love to work on a much later shift. At work, I usually don't really feel like I'm ready to dive into something until afternoon; and I've spent many hours coding away on personal projects after the kid goes to sleep at 8.

This is important. There's a backlash right now against companies that _demand_ such work hours, which is totally understandable.

But - some people _choose_ to work at 2AM. They could be people still working at 2AM after starting at 10AM (I hurt for those people, but to each their own) or they could be people that started work at 9PM after a 6 hour break from working from lunchtime to 3PM.

Such is the beauty of the remote-working culture. Working at what some might consider "crazy" or "unhealthy" hours might actually be the result of having a healthy work-life balance, spending the "regular" waking hours with your family and enjoying life.

An interesting aspect that gets sidelined in a discussion involving flexible hours is the undeniable observation that the nature of work requires 'sprints'. Not in the agile context but as in physical running context. Software development happens in bursts trying to fit it into the assembly line model of fixed working hours and repetitive tasks just shows a gross misunderstanding of how things get built in the software world.

The sprint analogy is especially true when you consider that units of work in software development can very often be neatly itemized into JIRA tickets.

I feel bad for those people. Unless it's their company, and they have a major ownership share, there's pretty much no reason for them to be putting in hours like that.

The only problem is that it ends up not being a choice. Once you start working those crazy hours, they're going to expect them, even after you "choose" not to work at 2AM.

"they" do not need to know when you work.

From my perspective, I think there's an unspoken balance that can be struck between the different sorts of coworkers. We're a relatively small team, for example. 5 people. 2 have kids, four total are married, making me the sole (and young) bachelor. Most live far from the office and telecommute, coming in a couple times a week, whereas I'm in every day.

So a balance is struck - I'm here in the office the bulk of work hours, and I'm fucking uncontactable after 5 or on weekends because I'm living a young bachelor life. The other guys are available during the day but by definition not as online as me, but if something comes up after hours or on the weekend, generally one of them will be around and can pick up whatever the emergency is.

Maybe it's because we're a small company with a good CEO but things just kinda "work out" with unspoken agreements here. I hope I can emulate this in later jobs.

I don't think this is WordPress employees taking a mile when given an inch by working remotely all the time. I believe WordPress encourages employees not to regularly go to the office. The reason being is they don't want a small faction of the company to become essentially collocated while the rest of the company is distributed, thus breaking their communication flows. Remote works for WordPress because almost all communication gets archived in Slack, email or p2 (their internal social network built on WordPress). Anyone can see what's going on or get caught up asynchronously. It's pretty much guaranteed that in a collocated environment some of that communication would happen offline IRL, and others would miss out on it.

"archived in Slack"

Wait, is there a way to make old conversations in Slack less painful to find and read? Anything more than 3 pages away is just not worth the effort for me.

Searching in the app is brutal, and if you are having a conversation in the same channel, it's basically worthless.

Have you tried in:<channel> <search query>? Seems to work ok for me. Similarly, using from:<user> <search query> is useful.

use the IRC bridge and log in plain text ;)

These guys are building a business in this space: https://slackarchive.io/

The claim to fame so far is free archiving for public channels, often useful for open source projects that have accepted the trade-offs that come with directing a community to a free public slack.

http://slackarchive.io/ is neat, you might be able to get utility out of that, depending on what you're doing.

I typically use the slack app to find conversations I want to read, and then if they're more than a few pages in the past, will read them in the web interface. The web interface seems somehow to perform many times better.

> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.

Happy customers, products shipped, features delivered per team, bugs fixed, documentation written, individual git commits, are all direct measures of productivity that the good companies and managers track.

Time spent in the office, visibility, and even overall time spent working etc. are poor indirect measures that doesn't require any skill from the manager.

Even the 'good' metrics you listed are not that good and can be easily gamed if they are important enough, e.g. can influence salary, etc.

Happy customers is the only exception, but it's essentially impossible to attribute this to a team or an individual and is more of a company's health metric. You could just replace it with revenue.

>>> products shipped, features delivered per team

Will lead to releasing products that should never be released, or releasing too early, or creating a lot of features just to increase the counter.

>>> bugs fixed

Then why ship quality product in the first place, if it is more valuable to have easy bugs to fix later?

>>> documentation written

Can result in poorly written, or way too detailed documentation which will go out of date the next day.

>>> individual git commits

Some people commit more than a dozen of times a day and happily push them. Or you can create tons of commits that deliver very little value (e.g. adds a single comment), but increases the counter.

I understand that it is all well intended, it just seems like it creates a game rather than solves a problem. Some people are great at adapting to games and rules, some people - not so much.

Quantifying developer's work has been discussed a lot, and I am still largely skeptical about such low level metrics. Essentially, it motivates people to maximize the score, even if it means doing things that are only good for the score, instead of good for the company.

But all of that assumes that you're just plotting it on a graph and checking how it looks. Humans are capable of doing more assessment than that. Really a manager should do at least some cursory checks of documentation, etc. to ensure that it's not poorly written, etc.

I think reactions like this tend to sidestep the issue, because orgs should never adopt any one metric in isolation, but instead try to use many different metrics as part of a larger holistic picture, both of the organization and of individuals.

If you measure how much stuff got done on paper within its agreed-upon deadline, sure, people may skimp on quality in order to ship something on time, and it probably would've been in the org's interest to delay release until all the work was really done.

And sure, if you measure against the number of bugs opened against production versions, trying to incentivize the least number of bugs opened as possible, you may invite people dealing with issues through back channels, so that they don't show up in the metrics.

And of course revenue is more of a company-wide metric.

But if you combine all of them - if your teams are hitting their feature development targets, and customers aren't complaining through established support lines, and revenues are up... is that not what makes a successful company?

In addition to your points, with which I agree, it also depends a lot on team culture. If you do your best to hire responsible adults and then treat your employees like adults most of them act like adults. When there is a healthy team culture of shared responsibility people who aren't pulling their weight tend to stick out.

The best way to avoid people gaming the system is to hire honest, hard working people who don't want to game the system. Then get out of the way and let them work.

You're right, of course, but hiring for culture fit is easier when you're a small company and you only have to hire for a few distinct roles. When you're a large company and you have a hiring quota of hundreds of engineers a year to deal with expected development requirements, well, that's where you start to need to "corporatize" and come up with good metrics.

I've never run a large company, or been high enough in management to try this, but I still think there is a better way:

In code we work in layers of abstraction. Large projects can be healthy when every layer is small enough to fit in your head.

In the same way, I think we could build a large company in layers of teams. Each layer should be manageable in the way discussed above.

Good modularity in code allows us to keep the whole problem in our head. Good team structure (requires good management) allows us to keep the management decisions at the tribe/human level that we are good at and not need the kind of mass, impersonal systems that lead to burdensome bureaucracy.

Of course, this kind of leadership and culture has to come from the top. It also requires that leadership explicitly avoid micromanagement, breaking the team boundaries. And requires continued commitment to treating your employees at every level like adults.

Of course, people are not code, but I think this organisational system of managing complexity can be applied to both.

It would be interesting to do some case studies, but I believe there are several large companies that have done this successfully, until top leadership changes (founder dies, etc.) and the new leader doesn't have the same trust of and commitment to employee/team autonomy. The dynamic changes, people notice and either leave or start gaming the system, etc.

There's some blatantly missing metrics here.

First off, there's no allowance made for mentoring and answering technical questions. If you go head-down and socially punish anyone who disturbs you - even for good reason - you'll get more done and get a raise. On the other hand, if you annoyingly ask questions that further your project at the expense of distracting people around you, that also shows up in your project metrics and not your coworkers'. This will likely end up resulting in a really dysfunctional, non-collaborative culture.

Second, technical debt. There's two casual factors here. First is that hacking together stuff helps your projects in the short run, while hurting the organization as a whole in the long run. Basically, another example of externalizing the costs of shipping your features. Also problematic is that working with lots of technical debt in the code base will stretch out your estimates, since there's tons of tech debt and making slow progress is the new normal. You'll "hit your feature development targets", but those targets will be a fraction of what they'd be with a better culture.

Third, and related to the above, is deadline inflation. Your organization ends up rewarding people who are better at convincing management to give them more time to ship things. Yeah.

1) Not so sure this is true. You may get more done individually in the short-term, but over the long-term, your anti-social behavior will cause the rest of your team to shut you out in turn, and your lack of visibility and understanding into what your team is working on will affect your future productivity and earnings. This is a Nash equilibrium at work, and good management will explain how the Nash equilibrium of co-operating on teamwork serves everyone's best individual long-term interests, even if the metrics naively seem to favor short-term action.

2) You don't need to adjust feature development metrics to get technical debt paid down. You set a target (e.g. 20% time to paying down debt), build a backlog of technical debt you know about, and either add the tasks to your sprint/version target (rewarding the team for completing them, like any other task) or come up with some other manner of getting them done, like Boy Scout code reviews (i.e. leave the codebase cleaner than you found it or fail review).

3) If you think you can ship better code by forcing arbitrary deadlines, then I hate to break it to you, but if the beatings continue, morale will not improve. And if you think you can substitute metrics and cash bonuses for good management skills to get people to work long hours so that you'll ship by the start of the holiday season (or other real deadline), then you don't understand how metrics is a tool for management and not a replacement for management.

I think I phrased my third point poorly, since I seem to have conveyed exactly the opposite effect that I intended. What I'm saying is that if you tie pay to performance against arbitrary deadlines, you're effectively paying engineers to pad their estimates. Estimation is definitely a pretty major game as it is, and we do ourselves no favors by paying people to play it more aggressively.

At my last job we learned that productivity was measured with scrum points (so, estimates) done and your Github activity.

It was ... not really efficient.

I could see measuring the "points committed" : "points complete" ratio, but the points themselves...?

Any metric you put on a graph for all to see needs to be something with a direct impact on the company. So happy customers yes, products/features/commits shipped, no.

Developer performance can not be measured quantitatively. It's okay for a manager to look at these things, but when they go to an underperfoming employee the story always has to be qualitative and personal about the specific work they are doing.

It's hard enough to create a culture where everyone is focused on the success of the business without reducing people's work to easily gamed metrics. If you do that, you tacitly send a message that the true quality of their work doesn't matter and then you've shot yourself in the foot big time.

It's hard enough to create a culture where everyone is focused on the success of the business without reducing people

No it's easy; make everyone an equity partner.

It's funny because "aligning employee interests with the company's interests" is probably one of the easiest problems for a business owner to solve, yet it's treated as some holy grail of business knowledge.

I once worked with an entrepreneur of a very closely held small business. It was owned exclusively by the entrepreneur and his family, no employee had any share whatsoever, as far as I could tell. He often complained that employees lacked initiative, work ethic, etc. and didn't "treat the business like it was their own". Yep, that's a head scratcher.

My last employer, a vast multinational, exhorted everyone to "think like an owner" but that was kinda hard to do when they referred to every employee as a "resource".

You're hijacking my comment to grandstand on an orthogonal point.

Even if everyone has equity, if you put up metrics to measure productivity, they will be gamed, so choose carefully.

I'm not hijacking it; I'm refuting it.

You are not refuting it, you are cherry-picking one phrase of my comment which is not central to the thesis and pushing your own agenda. That bit of my comment can be completely replaced without affecting my comment but giving you no stone against which to grind your axe. Compensation is one thing, feedback on performance is another. Unless you think everything should be a cooperative with equal ownership and that will magically solve all performance problems, in which case go do that, but I will neither found a company like that nor work for one and I have two decades of experience on both sides of the table.

How do you game a metric which is actually "the performance of the company"? You can't without, umm, making the company perform better, which is the goal, no? It's only - as you asserted - "hard" because people try to wriggle around this truth to capture a bigger slice of the pie for themselves.

Dude, you are willfully ignoring my point. The discussion is about metrics such as bugs fixed, features shipped, and commits pushed. The sentence you are fixated on is entirely beside the point.

> if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot.

Employers have been eating up to 10 hours (2 hours per day) of unpaid commute time of employees for ages. Is it then really surprising that no one wants to waste time coming to work. If that time was paid, if commute time was paid, then maybe you would consider it. But it's a very simple economic calculation. It's like why am I paying for that time. I don't have to, so I won't. That 10 hours is 20% extra salary that is not paid.

And if your argument is that you could live closer, then the counter argument is that employers should have their offices in affordable areas where any employee can afford to easily live because rent is cheap. Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.

It's interesting to view commute time as the employer's time rather than employee's time, and therefore as time that should be compensated. I'd always thought of it as the employee's time, and the employee's decision about where to live and how to commute, etc. As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job.

Playing with this idea a bit: do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?

Everyone has to eat at all times regardless. Everyone has to wear clothes. I bought steel toed boots that I only needed for work, company had a $150 allowance for that.

Many workplaces require a certain attire. You probably already own dress clothes, but someone who doesn't might have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to obtain clothes for their job. But I'm not just talking about just white collar positions either; construction workers, photographers, waiters, retail workers, telemarketers, etc. all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". If I can expense my ergonomic keyboard, a dock worker better be able to expense their steel-toed boots.

> all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables".

In Germany if some safety clothes are compulsory by law, the employer has to pay for them: http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicher...

Interesting related court case from a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...: "a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court, ruling that time spent by workers waiting to undergo anti-employee theft security screenings is not "integral and indispensable" to their work, and thus not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Court delivered their ruling on December 9, 2014."

I found this because I had a vague memory about a case about time spent "closing down stores" but maybe it was this or something else.

I was really shocked at that ruling, and especially at the court's unanimity regarding it.

Perhaps there's some deeply technical reason that it makes sense, but the conclusion seems absurd to me based on common sense.

From the actual ruling:

Finally, respondents’ claim that the screenings are compensable because Integrity Staffing could have reduced the time to a de minimis amount is properly presented at the bargaining table, not to a court in an FLSA claim.[0]

The petitioner brought the claim under FLSA. It sounds really bad on face that the workers have to do this as a condition of employment, but imagine if instead of this pat-down, the complex property was really big, and employees had to walk an extra 25 minutes to their station because public transit could not access those roads, no employee cars were allowed, and no shuttles were provided. It boils down to a worker/employer bargaining dispute, not a labor violation.

[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf (page 2 as numbered)

Seems like a sensible application of the Portal-to-Portal Act, which specifically says that "activities which are preliminary to or postliminar" to the main job activity are not compensable.

I.e., blame Congress.

I guess it is not really that different than the parking area being really far away and you have to spend time either waiting for/taking the shuttle or walking.

It's about free market at work. You can choose to work for another company that pays you more, or pays you for that time.

To some extent, yes on all counts.

> As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job.

Meaning you make concessions to either where you live or where you work. Isn't that a sign that it's not completely your choice? If all jobs could be done from home you would have all choices of housing available.

> do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?

Same reasoning here: The only way you're not making concessions is if you happen to like the clothes that fit within the dress code of the company (if any).

And as for lunch, I've done IF for a few years (stopped a while back), and it's really difficult if you don't tailor it around work when it comes to work lunches, fitting meetings, available restaurants around work if you don't bring your own lunch, etc.

I don't have much problems with either of it, as I've accepted it as status quo, but it's obviously not a free choice.

> Meaning you make concessions to either where you live or where you work. Isn't that a sign that it's not completely your choice?

Well yes, I mean there are many things about my job and my life that aren't completely my choice if by that we mean I have to make prioritization decisions and tradeoffs. Not being forced to work from any specific location eliminates one of the constraints, sure.

The point was more about the idea that commute time should be compensated for those whose employers to require them to come to an office. That's not obvious to me. Suppose, for example, I chose to live 2 hours away from my office. Should I be compensated for the 4 hours per day I spend commuting?

> The point was more about the idea that commute time should be compensated for those whose employers to require them to come to an office. That's not obvious to me. Suppose, for example, I chose to live 2 hours away from my office. Should I be compensated for the 4 hours per day I spend commuting?

Yes, you're right. I wasn't arguing for a mandate, but merely questioning the status quo. But if I could change it, I guess I would say;

Not if you have the choice to work from home instead. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe? Obviously no one wants to pay wage to someone who chooses to live hours from work, but likewise if my employer forces me to be somewhere far away when I can get the same work done remotely, that's equally bad.

Of course both parties has the choice of switching employer/employee, but I digress.

Your choice of where to live (therefore, commute time) is inextricably linked to your job/compensation. In theory I could move closer to work--but to do so, I would need to make more money, which, if it were possible, I'd already be doing. Similarly, I could change jobs to one closer to my home, but that would likely mean making less money, which may price me out of my current home, forcing me to move even farther away...

Everything in the valley back in the day was 15 min away.

Now that same 15 min takes 1.5 hrs. Because everyone's now here.

Who pays for that?

You can move Google out of Mountain View to Bumfuck, Idaho. Then you lose the centralization and plugging into the network.

Who pays for that?

But to be honest, most prefer it this way. This crazy doo-dad lifestyle of fighting that 3 hour traffic. Because the thing is, if you work hard to win (or more likely you're just fortunate enough to win), then you get to enjoy central networking, get to enjoy the year over year growth of your property, get to enjoy the convenience of job hopping, get to enjoy that the smartest and the brightest all want in on this action.

So I don't know. I paid for my own uniforms in the marine corps. Someone should be sending me checks!

Well the company gets to enjoy having employees, because they tolerate them working from home. They get to make all the sweet sweet profit. They see their revenues increase, etc. Your whole perspective can be framed the exact other way as well. At the end it's a negotiation. Who wins that is a matter of perspective. It's a privilege to have talented employees just as it's a privilege to work for a good company.

Right. And every time one hits up hackerne.ws it's wage theft as well. Cuts both ways.

I'm doing that in the office right now, has nothing to do with location.

Measure productivity, don't police time.

If you as an employer are getting less results from telecommuting (while also not being able to attract better talent, which you should) then of course it's a loss, but I would like to see those numbers. I for one produce better results at home, even if I were to spend 2 hours on hn.

Usually it's more like free training and networking and sales opportunities, but whatever helps you lick boots better I guess...

That's not wage theft?

You paid for your own uniform but you were provided a uniform allowance unless you were an officer, correct? Well line employees are like enlisted except no ones getting an allowance here

The job of line employees, especially developers at companies in Silicon Valley, are in no way, shape, or form comparable to the job of enlisted soldiers/marines. Don't even try.

Try and go against your managers orders and see how well it goes. Developers like to imagine we are in the upper class of society now because of how we are treated and the intellectual effort our work takes, but that's not the case. We happen to be in demand now but we have more in common with blue collar workers a hundred years ago than we would with the professional class of the same time

Way deep in the thread here but is this being down-voted because of the comparison of tech employees to enlisted? If so, cool.

But - if it's downvoted for the allowance part, somebody is sending checks... eventually. I totally got the OP's intention with the phrase - well taken - but for folks that are interested:

$1900 initial for the Marines (following actual activation so you'd have to do the initial out of pocket) then ~$633 / yr after. http://www.military.com/benefits/military-pay/allowances/clo...

Not sure where the heck you're living in the Bay Area, but I haven't had a 3 hour commute here...ever. I've lived in areas with true traffic nightmares (NY & DC), Bay Area doesn't compare at all in my experience here the past 3 years.

I know multiple colleagues who have 1.5 hour commutes each way. For example live in San Francisco and commute to Mountain View, or live in Oakland and commute to Mountain View.

I did the SF -> Google commute from 2011 through 2014, and it was usually 1.5 hours each way, up to 2 hours on a bad day. I assume it has only gotten worse.

My commute (Livermore to south bay) is 2+ hours each way. From the folks I know/work with, this seems like a fairly average commute, maybe a little on the high side.

who pays employees commute time? is this an american thing?

Employees eat commute time, at least in most white collar salary positions in the US.

What's interesting is that we can get paid for travel to other customer sites of our employers when using personal vehicles (up to $.535/mile per IRS guidelines[0]), but not to go to our actual workplaces.

[0]https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-busi...

If you have a home office and commute to a client site you can claim it as a deduction at tax time. Outside of that I do know of some employers who do reimburse mileage as long as it is filed and more than 20 miles but that is rare.

If commute time was paid you'd be incentivizing people to live further from work.

The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.

In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?

I suspect if commute time was indistinguishable from work time as far as pay goes, employers would still want to encourage employees to live closer to work in various ways.

I've seen it first hand. At one large financial services company employees who came in early (before 7am) or stayed late (after 9pm) had access to free black cars for commuting.

That had a direct impact on at least one person I know's decision to move further from the office.

This sounds like the old conservative canard about some folks not wanting to earn more income because it will put them in the next tax bracket.

"In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?"

Look at it in another way -- you're basically penalizing the employees that don't spend time commuting by paying them less money. In practice I've seen this kind of phenomenon with smoking. Many years ago, in the army, the smokers got smoking breaks whereas the non-smokers did not. Soon almost all soldiers were smokers!

I knew a guy a long time ago who pretended to be a smoker so he could get periodic "smoke breaks" from the office.

although most believe the cost of commuting falls to the employee, in reality, the cost is shared. a long commute means the employee will demand more money, quit sooner, not accept the job in the first place, etc.

Well if your goal here is to make sure people continue to waste 2 hours of their day on commuting then look no further than making that time paid.

It's a perverse incentive for the whole destructive car lifestyle that has you sitting utterly depressed in some metal death box surrounded by millions of your peers in more death boxes as you slowly trample through cities (picking up a few of the locals on the way and leaving them dead by the roadside) to your job.

> Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.

Clients expecting you to be there is a perfectly valid reason. Peers isn't.

Those places that are affordable are affordable because not many people want to live there. Those places where people do want to live are quickly becoming less affordable.

Not entirely sure I caught your thought about "..direct measure of productivity."

Butts in seats is an indirect measure of productivity.

I find that (typically) being remote forces you to make tangible, valuable progress as there is no room to hide behind "showed up on time, sat in a bunch of meetings."

There will never be a perfect system for all people in all roles, so YMMV.

>> Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000's, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010's with streaming Netflix.

Remote or not, it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team.

There are some tasks where you can work on blocks of time at any an hour of the day, but there are also tasks and time you need to be available (whether it's voice, chat, video) and responsive.

"it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team"

That sounds to me more like a poor problem deconstruction and task distribution. For problem deconstruction though, I agree that team discussion might be desirable, thus -- availability requirement.

After working from home most of my career, I wish I had an office to go to. I find it very lonely at home.

There are coworking spaces you can rent with fellow telecommuters in most cities and of course coffee shops as well.

Yeah, getting a co-working space was the best $350 / month i've spent. Effectively solved all of my complaints, met new friends, and could nap at the desk when needed ;)

$350/mo?? How much would the gas cost for you to commute to your physical office (assuming you have one)? Are you really coming out ahead compared to commuting to an office?

How much would the equivalent office space cost for the employer?

I've heard of these but it's been tough to justify the costs. Coffee shops are good, but they're usually crowded with awful internet. I'm finding some success with the library. I found a big one that has lots of people working away. I went today and got a lot of work done and felt wonderful, so maybe the public library is my new co-working space :)

> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.

Curious what you meant here.

As was I. The direct measure of productivity is, and should be, successful work completed. It's a pretty easy measure, actually - is stuff getting done in the time expected.

> I've been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.

If that's the tradeoff I think I'll keep commuting.

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