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Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

I might be in a minority here, but I really don't feel like full time WFH is more productive. It could be indicative of my work place's culture only, but I feel like there are many more meetings now & communication is much harder. Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.

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As an employee, it doesn't matter if it's more productive. You greatly increase your pay per hour of work given that you don't have to commute and you definitely don't spend 8 hrs of work consumed by work like you are forced to when in an office.

Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar (that you partially define along with your employer). Caring about maximizing productivity is the goal of your employer. But you have some leverage in this job market so it's not like they can squeeze you dry. Remote only helps the employee side of that adversarial relationship.

I absolutely don't care about productivity. I care about

> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.

I like showing up at work to work together with my co-workers. If you don't then maybe you should get a new job where you like the people you work with.

Am I really not looking forward to the new remote work future. Maybe someone will come up with a way to restore the socializing I got from work. I don't just want to hang out with friends. I want to work together with people on a common goal, and by "work together" I mean I want to do this in the same space. Just like eating lunch on zoom or going to a virtual bar via facetime is not as good as actually siting at the same table with friends neither is remote work as fulfilling "for me" as actually being in the same space as my co-workers. But then again I like my co-workers and I like the things we are building together.

Is a local co working space out of the option? Just genuinely curious. Of course, when the pandemic is over.

I think this will be increasingly popular. You can minimise your commute while retaining the social aspect. I've worked out of shared offices for 20 years and enjoy it.

> You greatly increase your pay per hour of work

I don't think this is guaranteed to happen. Another possible outcome is that tech salaries will pin to the lowest common denominator, such that employers will "outsource" much of their engineering work to engineers that live in low cost-of-living markets.

As someone whose friends are mostly blue collar workers who were scolded for being concerned that "poor people from other places will steal our jobs", I'm finding all of these posts to be delightful.

It's pretty funny. Though it's misguided for the same reason. Making high-productivity jobs available to more people is good. In 2015 it was estimated that US GDP is 9.5% lower than it could be as a result of housing shortages in just San Francisco, New York, and San Jose.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w21154

Sounds pretty good for those engineers.

Yeah, it's great news for engineers living in places where people don't pay more than a dollar per day for food. "Eat the rich" is one of most unintentionally-ironic phrases ever muttered.

2 things: we’re going to see pay cuts (because convenience and it’s easier for the drones) and your life quality is also going to be impacted (work/personal life separation? bye bye and good luck)

The companies that abuse work/life separation have been doing so without remote work and will do so regardless of the situation. Generally, these companies tend to pay more because if they didn't, nobody would do them.

So just as always, you have a choice, what's worth more to you? Money, or free time? And pick your job accordingly.

That isn’t strictly true and depends highly on the applicable labor market. For example, the worst paid software job I ever had was for a defense contractor that demanded 10 hour workdays 7 days a week during “crunch time” to meet deliverables and overtime frequently the rest of the year.

They paid poorly precisely because of the relative lack of opportunity for software in the region at the time. That meant anyone who’s livelihood was in software had little recourse other than to move. That was the option I took, but others can’t for a number of reasons.

Well now with remote work those people actually have job choices.

How would this be any different than now? Companies that have a culture of disrespect towards their employee's time by expecting responses to after hours emails and calls will continue to do so, as they always have. The onus is on the individual to determine if they're going to put up with that or not.

it’s always a push and pull kind-of thing. if you answer your email after hours you will receive emails after hours. if you work on your free time more work is going to show up on your plate. as with everything in life having boundaries is a must. if your boss makes you work nights or weekends make sure this is explicitly done (ie have them ask you formally) and ask for a raise to compensate for your time. if they don’t back off find another job.

Work-life balance is a necessary thing that each person has to work on for themselves. Learning to say 'no' while delivering on the things you're asked, and delivering well, is one of the most important things an employee can do to gain respect and to give the company boundaries.

Why do you see the employer/employee relationship as adversarial? Perhaps you are working in the wrong company. You need employers as much as they need employees. It’s a myopic view.

An employee/employer relation is mutually beneficial but that doesn't stop conflict. The employer is still going to try and optimize to get more out of that relationship than it puts in. The employee should also do the same.

Just because you're working together in a circumstance that benefits the two parties doesn't mean each party is not also working against each other to some degree to better optimize their self-interests.

An employer may need an employee to create something and by creating and selling that thing, an employer and employee may both get a cut and benefit. None of that prevents the employer or employee from attempting to get a larger cut or do less work (invest less time) to receive their cut. Extremes to either side cause the relationship to collapse but there's definitely wiggle room in the margins beyond a 50/50 split.

I've yet to meet a single employer that doesn't try to optimize on labor costs in that relationship through some component or another, directly or indirectly.

This is a pretty fascinating perspective to me, one I had never considered. I had always thought of the employee who is paid more than the value they provide as being lazy and a leech. But that’s exactly what the corporation is doing: trying to make a profit by paying for less value than they capture from their employees.

I don't see my employer as paying less than the value they get from me. I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept. If I go do things on my own I have so many things I have to deal with. Assuming you start a business then insurance, taxes, deductions, payroll (gotta pay yourself from your company) plus I have to market my skills, network, find customers, negotiate contracts, and always worry if I don't I'll go hungry or miss rent. Or, I can just show up at some other company as an employee and in exchange for getting less than the full amount they take care of all of that and all the risk.

>I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept.

Which is also true. At the same time, risk is highly relative which is why this situation is feasible at all. What's risky for you to do as an individual is not of the same order of magnitude of relative risk when you consider scaling of available resources.

Example, Alphabet, Amazon, or Company Y decide to invest $1 million in a new SaaS 'X' effort with some monthly fee in an attempt to build a successful product/service. These companies have arrays of pre-existing successful products/services they've built (typically diversified) that generate stable profits. Relative to that sort of expected profit, SaaS 'X' is a drop in the bucket. If 'X' fails, it's the same absolute monetary loss ($1 million) but the relative risk of losing $1 million isn't significant to any of these businesses, it's small relative to their total resource pool of disposable assets. Loss recovery will also take significantly less time.

On the other hand, if I as an individual go through the effort to form an LLC, develop SaaS 'X' myself and fail, $1 million is nothing to scoff at. Even if you're in the higher income scales of our industry and making $300-500k+/yr for labor, you're looking at ~3-4 years or so of potential losses and values that are probably near or a bit more than your total personal assets, at the very least I'd say 10%. If you start an LLC and get a loan or have some investor drop money on you, $1 million is still likely going to be a lot relative to your loan. It's highly likely that if 'X' fails your business will fail. There's high relative risk here (there are some mitigations strategies from your personal assets but it's still significant). You're probably going to face noticeable financial hardship or have to revert back to the labor market due to business small failure rates.

Risk is mitigated through scale, snowballed growth, and diversification (amongst other strategies) in our economic system through initial successes that often occur either through true innovation/market creation/penetration and/or sheer luck.

I think you may be reading something into the term “adversarial” that isn’t there. A relationship can be both adversarial and cooperative at the same time, that is just the nature of human behavior.

My personal take on things is that if you don’t recognize the adversarial part of the employer/employee relationship, then you will suffer for it. It’s more healthy to recognize where parties have competing interests, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them.

I’d also say that the people who can ignore the adversarial aspects of employment can only do so because of a fair bit of privilege. For example, people will throw around the saying here that “HR is an advocate for the company, not the employee,” but many of us will never really have to deal with HR in a way where it really matters.

> You need employers as much as they need employees.

I'm not sure I'd agree. When a company loses an employee it's an inconvenience but when an employee loses their job it's often devastating.

It is in some cases and isn't in others. I wouldn't call it myopic though. Different people have different experiences.

It's not zero-sum, but we also aren't perfectly aligned. There's room to make decisions that benefit you and don't benefit your employer.

If they aren't adversarial, why do so many successful employers treat them as such?

The market rewards them for this. Is the market wrong, or your thesis?

Because you can't say "no, I don't think so" if they suggest you not show up at work on Monday?

Your employer needs employees, not specific employees.

More specifically, it needs labor and most employers could care less where it comes from.

Maximizing productivity can be a shared goal of employer/employees if the employer pays fairly for higher performance (which many tech companies do). At that point it becomes a tradeoff for the employee on cost of going to the office (commute, wasted time) vs. cost of remote (potentially lower chances of future higher pay). That tradeoff is probably worth it for some people.

And this change isn't going to improve employee leverage, it's going to decrease it substantially when all companies develop processes to have a significantly higher pool of candidates to hire from. Long-term employees will look at having a company-provided office with a good work environment as a luxury.

> Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar

This is the path to mediocrity and leaving tons of money on the table in much of the tech industry.

Not if I use the time gained productively for your own purposes & goals that your employer cannot satisfy. This can involve more income, more life satisfaction, etc.

I've been able to be well above mediocre in west coast tech for years now with this strategy /shrug For FAANG, startups, and other BigCos.

FYI, the bar can be the bar needed to get a promotion & bump your pay grade. It can also be to keep your current job & stay the course. And it can change over time strategically.

Let me elaborate a bit. If you are a top performer at tech companies with an obvious outsized impact, it’s easy to make 4x your original comp in spot bonuses, additional RSU grants, etc.

Unless your side hustle brings in $300k+ a year, you’re better off becoming critical at the main job because it becomes very lucrative.

Remote definitely does not help only the employee side. Because of remote I have hired people that I would not be able to hire. You vastly increase the talent pool when you cast the net wider.

It's a win-win! Efficiency for all.

For me, WFH let's me have a much better work/life balance. I have a family with 3 small kids. I was racing against the clock in the morning to pitch in around the house, arriving at work already stressed out usually late, put up with all the work place distractions, had to suffer through rush hour traffic, arrived home stressed out and found it difficult to switch to family mode. Very rarely would I get into a grove of deep work. I tended to hit that grove after 2PM, which was only a few hours before I needed to start watching the clock and dread the traffic back.

Now, WFH I'm free to set my own schedule. Sometimes I do my best work later in the evening, something that I never had time or energy to do while following the "9-5" schedule.

I don't miss the socialization much, probably because of the roll my family fulfills. The most important difference now is that I have a lot more patience with my family, because I don't feel the constant stress of my old commute and schedule.

I totally agree.

I was super productive in the first month of WFH, but that spike is going away, and I think a large part of it is meeting fatigue. The projects we are working on require coordinating with lots of devs within our team and then devs and PMs on other teams. That means lots of meetings here and there to make sure we're all on the same page.

There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).

My team does have lunches together remotely, but having to be tied to the computer the whole day, I often want to drop out of those and just be outside in the sun.

But to your point about burnout, I find that that's the other extreme as well. In those afternoons or days that I don't have meetings, there's a sense that, okay, I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard. While at the office, you'd have occasionally breaks and conversations in the hall when you were getting up for coffee and you could see people's rhythms. At home, I don't see that, so my natural, irrational belief is everyone must be working hard, so I should too.

For me I don't think it's meeting fatigue, I have about the same amount of meetings as before. But I also noticed a similar productivity spike. Unfortunately what I think is happening is that we are using up a built-up "social capital" from when we were in the office together. Many of the people I know to ask for quick questions/favors I know because of hallway/lunch conversations. As new remote devs rotate onto my team I feel the team is becoming more impersonal and I am more reluctant to ask them things or help them. And likewise I think they are less likely to ask for help to get unblocked, than they would be in office.

But FB people ops (or beyond) aren't stupid and hopefully they can come up with ways to intentionally replace this. Won't be the same but something is needed and will be better than nothing or ad-hoc.

> There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).

This sounds like a normal day in the office for me pre-lockdown :/

I feel this pretty hard. I'm an engineering manager and there are multiple days a week where I will spend _six hours_ in video calls with an hour for lunch and MAYBE a 30 minute break somewhere in the day. It's a nightmare and the days feel like complete throwaways. It's made worse because we try and do "No Meeting Thursdays" which means meetings tend to pile up on Tuesday and Wednesday (nobody wants to meet on Monday or Friday, either).

The feeling of "I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard" can also be pretty hard to shake. Especially if most people are heads-down and there's no chatter on Slack or email or anything going on.

This doesn't sound right to me and reads like 20 people in the team trying to decide on things at the same time. I sometimes had days where it's a meeting after meeting ( I'm in management) but to be honest most of those meetings aren't necessary. Since we all moved to remote work, the number of meetings dropped by 80% and everyone is fine with it.

Yeah, I don't necessarily think the meetings thing is something everyone's experiencing. For my team, the challenge is that the projects we are working on at the moment do span multiple teams, so it's kind of the worst time to have to coordinate remotely. We previously were considering flying people down to meet in person and work together for a week to get up to speed on things (i.e. high bandwidth communication).

How many teams and what's the average team size? Wouldn't having one representative from each team going to these meetings be better? Meetings with large number of people dilute individual contribution,focus,and deprive those attending from time to do the actual work.

It's really important to recognize that the current way people are Working From Home does not reflect how WFH works under "normal" circumstances for remote first organizations.

1. Companies have to invest in work from home practices and they have just started to do that. Using zoom and creating more meetings to replace in person experiences is not sufficient.

2. People have in effect just brought work into their home, into a house with no child care and generally no prepared work spaces

So please don't use this period as a reference for what WFH looks like when an organization is dedicated to doing it.

On the other hand, my most negative impressions of WFH have come from environments where a minority of employees are doing it. When a majority is FTF, it’s much harder to manage communications and expectations because so much of the critical information makes it to the remote workers slowly, and they miss out on decision-making opportunities.

So in some ways, the current situation is actually an improvement over a more typical split environment.

Let me buy a house in a quiet neighborhood with a dedicated office and I'll show you real productivity gains.

Ask me to WFH in a shared room in a tiny SiValley apartment with construction, gardeners and the neighbors music blasting randomly and I will show you how to waste $250k per year.

I work remote from a quiet neighborhood with dedicated office. I’m still distracted half the time with other things and often get bored sitting in my office by myself. I wander around the house a lot — which is full right now with kids remote learning.

I guess you don't have kids at home

I’ve heard kids can make it difficult, but these are kids that have lived most of their lives with mom or dad working outside of home and they’re trained as such. If this becomes the norm, the crazy, loud and annoying child trope I seem to hear about a lot will greatly reduces as the children are raised with ‘work from from home in mind.

There’s really only so much you can do to train small children to be quiet. My oldest is almost 4 and she’s just now getting to the point where she’s able to be quiet on her own for extended lengths of time. My younger kid is 18 months and when she’s awake there’s basically nothing that can stop her squawking.

We are moving to a house next month with a separate office space on the other side of a 2 car garage from the main house. I am beyond excited.

by god, please share this secret of getting your 4 year old to be quiet on her own for extended lengths of time! :bow:

We taught our toddler that being noisy wakes up his infant sibling from naps, and we tie some of his favorite activities to his sibling's nap time. He quickly figured out how to stay quiet and started scolding us when we made noise. It's not perfect, but pretty good. Straight out of Dale Carnegie, you might say.

My neighbors son is 3 year old

When I am repairing my car/bike, he comes with his bike (small plastic one) and gets under it and starts repairing act.

And he does it for long as I am repairing mine.

It's interesting that I don't live with him but he is copying my action but when I asked his mom if he helps with housework as he probably sees her doing a lot of housework, she said no.

I've no idea why getting under a bike is more appealing to him than doing stuff like cleaning with a mop and bucket.

cough

kicks the dirt a bit

We call it iPad time.

The truth is somewhere in between. Through wfh you gain an hour or two commuting and get rid of a lot of distractions but you lose the face to face contact. I think 80% wfh or something similar should be close to ideal. One day a week for meetings and watercooler chat, and four days of wfh.

I’m on my 10th year of wfh with just a handful of days per year in the office and I notice how each time I’m in the office I realize I actually like that guy who is professionaly the most annoying one. This is extremely important for an organization to work. I do it too little and while I wouldn’t want to go 100% to the office I realize I’m not doing it enough.

I think this is the right answer. For me, I work in embedded and have to talk to lots of people with different backgrounds. Slack communication and even phone calls just don't work when you're trying to learn or explain something really complicated. I think a 1-3 days in the office (depending on what a company needs) would be awesome.

So my company takes a somewhat similar approach to those who can, and those who want to.

We are 90% remote. Most remote employees are in the same area though, so sometimes they commute to the office for weekly meetings or just to hang out and work together.

I don’t live in the same country so I’m 100% remote. However, I still travel to the office ( when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic going on ) a few times a year.

I think giving people the option to work in the office when they want to is the best solution. Keep meetings on skype/jitsi, whatever, but give people the option to attend in person. More people will come than you might think.

I worked at a setup like that, and it was really bad because people were coming on random days. In a set-up like this, people need to have agreed upon days to come back to work

One of the big benefits to companies of WFH is dramatically reduced real estate costs (plus all of the support services required - cleaning, security, maintenance). If you still need your office capacity to support 100% of the staff in the office at a given time, you lose most of that benefit.

On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them.

I manage four small development teams and the one metric I track is velocity or velocity per developer (VPD). If you're familiar with scrum, you probably have a sense of what this means. (Note: this data is tracked in an open spreadsheet and not used to reward or punish but rather to adjust and adapt.)

Anyway, we went full-time remote from in-office 9-10 weeks ago. We did have some experience being partially remote (team members in different offices) before this. A comparison of avg VPD for last 3 sprints in-office (WFO) vs last 3 sprints (WFH):

  Team |  WFO |  WFH
    1  |  8.6 |  7.8
    2  |  9.2 |  7.6
    3  |  8.1 |  7.6
    4  |  7.5 |  7.7

This the first time I've actually compared them and I'm mildly surprised WFH is lower. Of course this ignores all sorts of caveats and qualifiers (like adjusting to a major change of environment and a pandemic!)

My impression is that productivity has held more or less steady and VPD will eventually not be too different from where it was.

I've also talked about this individually with members of my team. The consensus seems to be leaning toward a flexible mixture of WFH and WFO. That's the future I'd like to see.

VPD is a bullshit number easily game and highly prone to politics. I read this as "people in office have an advantage with politics". Which is a real thing. A bad thing, but a real thing.

Suffocating Agile, as is the standard these days, is about pushing away risky, but really valuable tasks, in favor of fine grained, easily estimated and understandable tasks that are only of minor importance but "feel" like progress. They are more amenable to Bad Agile, and so are the tasks that get selected increasingly in the long run.

WFH is far, far better at deep work, which is much more important to the long term value of a company.

The fact that WFH under current circumstances is close to WFO under normal circumstances, I think that's vindication for WFH.

Remember we are not robots, people are working under immense strain. I am very surprised at your mild surprise.

>I'm mildly surprised WFH is lower.

Schools are closed.

And if you have kids but they aren’t yet in school, you’re likely juggling watching them while working.

Any trend up or down on the past 3 months? Until lockdown, WFH for me meant coding on the couch. After lockdown, it took me some time to get a comfortable chair and ergonomics worked out. I'm still adapting, just ordered more office equipment that arrived on Sunday. When layoffs hit my company, that definitely made feel worried. Now that's over and I've been tuning out the news. I feel like I've been much more productive the past 2 weeks than when this started.

Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.

"Velocity is the sum of the estimates of the stories that were completed in an iteration. If the programmers estimate perfectly, it's simply a measure of the number of hours that the programmers worked, minus interruptions. The number is often confused by estimates that aren't 100% accurate. Velocity measures a strange combination of estimate accuracy and hours worked. It's a great planning tool, but as a metric, it has serious flaws."

https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Productivity-Metric.html

For a well-tuned, consistent team that has experience working together and estimating together,

do you have any other recommendation?

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20171213

Velocity is just the average sum of the story points a team completes

The article you've provided continues to keep saying story points are good things.

I don't know how we've found something contrary to what I've asked, yet.

Yes, value velocity. It’s linked from the above blog entry.

How do you measure:

* multipliers, like infrastructure work or pipeline improvements?

* fixing of technical debt that may have no immediate benefit?

* projects of uncertain monetary value?

* projects with great short term value but so much technical debt that they crumble the company a few years later?

* moonshots that may revolutionize the company?

How would organizations like the entirety of Microsoft Research where some guy got to play with coloring problems for a long time and that just so happened to end up requiring him to solve a subset of the halting problem, which just so happened to have benefit in driver validation? (It’s going to take me a looong time to find that source somewhere on the internet.)

This is where the right answer is "you do you", since only you and your team know what works best in your operating environment. The previous poster is correct, though, that working backward from business value measurements in order to drive IC behavior is almost always the smartest path.

Given this, I don't believe the this person's original argument is, to use their words, meaningful, then.

> Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.

They were responding to someone that was using their average story point completion rate to track their productivity.

This person seems to be talking about what sorts of work to work on - the kind that makes the company money.

If it's already been predicted or measured that a certain project is going to earn the company money, then you need to know how long it's going to take to complete that project, which means either estimating it as a whole, or breaking the project into parts and estimating each part.

Assuming two projects of similar mathematical proportionality of size and value, you can then estimate velocity based on how much projected time it's going to take to complete each step of each project, as estimated by story points or similar.

In this way, story points can still be a meaningful metric that you can estimate velocity on.

In short, the discussion is on two separate things and their initial premise of velocity being meaningless is not correct.

There's a difference between productivity and prediction.

Velocity is a great prediction tool. Given a total estimate, it can tell you approximately how many weeks it will take to be done. It's a unit conversion factor: velocity = 25 points / week, therefore 100 points = 4 weeks.

Productivity is defined as output / input. Effort and time are both "input." Velocity is a way of converting from points (effort) to weeks (time). To measure productivity, you still need to define "output."

OP said, "On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them."

But OP didn't define "output," so they weren't measuring productivity. They just showed that their effort --> time unit conversion factor had changed. Given that there's any number of possible reasons for this—changes in hours worked, changes in overhead, changes in estimating technique, changes in estimate accuracy—the numbers probably aren't meaningful.

This still seems ancillary, though.

They're measuring how much work they're getting done based around approximate predicted complexity / work amount using story points and then using that to map overall work output and charting it from between non-WFH and WFH. If the projects they're working on have tended to remain of similar complexity with people that tend to be consistent, then this seems like a perfectly fine metric for exactly what they're trying to discuss: the relative output from WFH and non-WFH.

Yes, that’s fair. I would say that hadn’t measured a change in productivity, but rather a change in overhead, but that’s probably just me being nitpicky about the word “productivity.”

One thing that stuck out to me is how consistent the numbers became between each other under WFH. I am not familiar with the metric or scrum, but I wonder what the cause is?

I noticed that, too. I think that's mostly coincidence. Velocity is based on story points. Here's a definition of story points as a unit of measure that I like:

A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of effort for completing requirements.

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-poi...

It is generally recommend you not include time as a component of that unit. For our teams, we kinda do. (Basically, for us, story point = time + uncertainty + complexity.) So there is a common standard. But with scrum you're supposed to size stories relative to other (previous) stories and I feel it's ok for the standard measure of a story point to drift apart between teams as long as its internally consistent to the team.

So maybe there's some kind of leveling force at work. But probably not.

Work from home is an old term from decades ago. What we have now is best described as "pandemic lockdown office". The actual state of the art is mobile work. With mobile work, you are in control of where you work - whether home, in your garden, on a nice place, in a shared office near your home, or in a company office that should be available when you need it, even if that's every day.

Also, ideally, you should be able to meet your colleagues once in a while to discuss important matters and keep a human connection. But surprisingly lots of trust and friendship can be maintained at distance.

Take time to refresh, slow down during the day and try to maintain social contact despite the lockdown (whatever your local conditions are, you might have to use remote methods of course).

I've been able to work well those last two months but can't wait to hug all my colleagues - miss them as well.

There seems to be a clear split in my social circle between developers and managers.

The former are generally pro working from home while the latter feel more swamped and are always talking about how busy they are now.

My guess is that for the first group it's pretty much business as usual, while the second (not generally producing visible output) feels that meetings are the only signal to indicate work being done. And as a result # of meetings in their area has gone up dramatically.

Would love to hear a counter from managers, perhaps I'm way off the mark.

You are way off the mark. Managers do have more meetings. The output they produce is not the number of meetings, but the results from those meetings. When done over teleconference, those meetings take a toll on the people involved. The managers were attending as many people interactions as before - just that the medium over videoconference makes it more tiring.

I wasn't suggesting their actual output was meetings :)

More that as we transition to remote, there is a higher internal desire to signal worth to offset not being in the office. Which on the surface is easily accomplished by adding meetings to your calendar.

This might be true, but I haven't felt it that way. My experience the past two months has been that my avg meetings/week has spiked from about 30 to 45, with avg time spent in meetings per week at 30 currently. The result is that I don't have any time to do Real Work(tm) because I'm constantly in meetings.

Why has this happened? My estimation is that it isn't "because I'm a manager" or "because I'm trying to create artificial face time to indicate my value", but because the broader organization hasn't matured enough culturally to know how to handle itself when everybody is WFH. Examples of things that haven't happened yet:

1) Top down declaration of any core hours, to reduce need for early morning and evening meetings 2) Adjustment of business objectives 3) Formal recognition that there is inequity across sub-populations when it comes to WFH effectiveness/capability (type of work, family situation, living situation, infrastructure access, maturity, mental state, ...).

The perception most within the org seem to have is that, while we pressed pause on some activities (proactive sales outreach, for example), we are accelerating others, and this is coming without much regard for human experience.

Imho, there's also a difference between normal WFH -- as a previous commenter noted -- and this cv-forced WFH. I think there's real fear, that well-founded, from workers who know they can't be 100% productive right now, but don't know if that fact will be adequately recognized by their employer or have clarity around how it will impact future performance ratings, compensation and promotion decisions. As a result, many folks are struggling with balance because they feel obligate to structure their lives in an unbalanced way.

Well, managers who do that signalling are poor ones, IMO. They are analogous to developers who split a single PR into multiple frivolous PRs to signal higher productivity.

Producing the results managers achieve over videoconference meetings takes more meetings (nothing as hoc now) and is physically tiring. Maybe that is what managers in your circle have been talking about.

I am a hobbyist machinist and I work in software development. Software development for me is good paying but boring work where I feel like I've sold my soul to devil and this has literally sucked all excitement out of my life.

Now that I work from home, I've more time at my hand so I am working on my hobbies which make me more productive at my work.

Why does it have to be more productive? It reduces the insane practice of commuting which saves time and energy. Even if it's slightly less productive (which I don't think is true), it would still be better overall. Productivity is not the be all and end all. Happiness and sustainability is what we should be aiming for.

Agree. Face-to-face is the highest bandwidth communication medium we have. It's not for everything, but there are definitely certain types of explanation/negotiation that happen much faster and have better outcomes in person.

I agree, and that means that sometimes that kind of communication is indispensable.

Zoom/Phone don't quite replicate that experience - they require focused attention. In person, your attention can "wander" while you are still focused on the conversation. Look how many people maintain eye contact in a cafe while having a conversation. Not many right? But do the same thing on Zoom/Skype/$VideoChat. "Hey, are you paying attention?" When really, wandering eyes are indicative (usually) of deep thought.

I have a heuristic when synchronous communication (phone, video chat) is necessary: When something is:

a) complex, or b) has a significant likelihood of misunderstanding (which is just a more specific version of (a).

Actual face to face... that's got to be for things that are socially critical. Breakups. Hard messages to people who are close. First meetings with the biggest client of your life. Important deals, if they take more than "Happy? Yep." Etc. Stuff where the physical impression makes or breaks the experience.

I think it’s almost always less productive. I suspect the reason software engineers like to talk about how productive it is, is because software engineers tend to enjoy sitting down and their own code the way the want to do it. Collaboration, teamwork, and anything that involves accounting for the needs of other stakeholders all gets in the way of that. So you can feel more productive, because you get to spend more time doing the things that you think of as productive. But really you’re probably operating much less efficiently from an organisational standpoint.

Social aspect or no, many executives believe their companies are more productive right now. What I'm hearing from the executive level is that the vast majority of companies are actively working to make WFH a permanent reality for those who wish to do so.

One executive I spoke to put it like this (paraphrased): "the introverts are loving it and the extroverts hate it. Productivity-wise its neutral to positive, but emotionally a lot of our folks are struggling without work so we're still committed to reopening offices when it's safe to do so."

> I might be in a minority here, but I really don't feel like full time WFH is more productive.

> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc

These are the exact reasons WFH is more productive IMO. Less people coming up to your desk talking nonsense distracting you.

I agree with you 100%

I run a completely distributed company and no one in their right mind would argue that a completely distributed company or even a partially work from home company

can be as good as the same people working TOGETHER in one office

The bonds are much stronger

The interaction is much better

Two superstars together are 10 times better than separately

However, when you do remote, it's only 5 times better

At minimum, it is 50% worse to have a distributed company than have a real same office, same location company

What really makes people say 'working from home is just as good' is a combination of

1) liking it for other reasons (more time with family, less pressure) and rationalizing

2) being able to cut out time wasting things (which they could anyways cut out if they were better at saying no to time wasting stuff

3) not ever having done it for a long time and seeing the long term implications

There is a very good reason that very few companies have become very big and very successful while being distributed companies

It’s not a fair comparison. Companies are forced to go remote and many are doing it quite wrong. Most companies have an immense amount of experience working in a shared space but only a month or two of remote so far. It’ll get better.

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