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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

Too many people work from home who don't need to. Some people have reasonable commutes and don't bother showing up in the office most of the week. While working from home may help your productivity since you don't have to worry about commute time, it has a negative impact on the rest of your team who walks into a half-empty office.

It's just unfortunate that the commute here in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that a lot of people end up working from home.

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I'm sorry, what criterion other than the commute time do you use to determine who "needs to" work from home? Increased productivity while working from home does not simply stem from lack of commute. It's all in the article.

Why bother with offices at all then? Why are companies paying tons of money for office space on prime real estate in SF, or dishing out free lunches and dinners, if people are more productive working from home? Google and Facebook should just mandate that people work from home.

Covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044

I didn't say that commute was the only factor, but it is a major factor. Give each person a private room and eliminate the commute, people will still work from home. It's comfortable, you don't need to deal with your manager or colleague in person, and everything's async so you can focus without getting interrupted by a knock on your private office door.

I have heard that argument before, mostly its by people for whom the office is some sort of social life replacement/ bro club experience. Also there are sun-king-middle-managers who only get that power feeling when a huge crowd of admirers tours the hallways with them.

All of it is completely unrelated with work. And sort of sad, although its a good thing, that no matter what happens, humans will needs humans.

I've worked with teams big and small, mostly as an individual contributor, and the issue with not having a good team culture is you get churn. You can't have good team culture when half of your teammates are just at home most of the time, or if you're at home and the rest of your team is in the office. People jump around companies too often because they get jaded, bored, enticed by better offers elsewhere, and without team camaraderie and connections that bind the team together personally, you're going to get a high churn rate.

>You can't have good team culture

There is no need in this.

Well, churn is just capitalism at work. The only stock you gain for loyalty is the laughing-stock, of everyone else who gets rewarded for double-jumping every ship.

This is the world they wanted, when they dissolved unions and other pillars of stability, one mans grape-vine over "Unreliable mercenaries" is another mans freedom of choice.

Here's to Sienna and Florence, their high towers may stand a thousand year or crumble under the siege tomorrow, no-one cares only the chests in the deep cellars are whats important.

All those walls build to create synthetic loyalty- be it out of fear of being law suited for knowledge transfer, or cartels to avoid the rising prices of mercenary's - if history tells us one thing - in the end the war always wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars

"Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing, wes Gold ich trag, des Tod ich bring."

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