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I am not so sure productivity has definitely improved.

I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out.

Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before.

Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.

I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't already work that way).

At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.

Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up.

My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.

This whole thing is so multifaceted I think it’s hard to draw any conclusions from it. In CA, we have COVID and fires so I’m essentially a prisoner in my house. If you locked me in my office, my productivity might go up too. But now that’s school is on and my kids are locked in here too. Productivity goes down. All in all, it’s a bumpy ride.

Is this a problem though? Is business suffering? Are there metrics on that?

Out of curiosity, how did your employer convince people to accept the increased risk of covid19 transmission that comes from working in the office?

Easy. Tell them they can come to work or find another job.

I think you may have misunderstood my post. I was asking how that particular employer handled the topic with its employees.

I'm trying to understand how much negotiating power software developers have with their employers these days; in general and on this topic in particular.

Is it possible that folks substituted their commute for extra work hours? There’s really not much to do, socially, when everything is locked down. Some people might take it as a chance to be a workaholic (with the possible burnout not in mind). In the office, I am pressured by folks walking by into leaving “on time” (they don’t realize I often start later than them).

Some people I have talked to are seeing this in their workplaces. They are having to tell the engineers not to work too hard so they don't burn out. Seeing 2+ hours a day of extra work.

Yes, but some middle manager gets to claim his paycheck due to having more meetings in the office now.

The same here. In addition, I see social problems accumulate slowly and the team seems to be failing apart. Interpersonal issues are nit solved until they boil in the home office, in person people were more eager to speak up about issues faster and more often.

I'm talking about macro level gains. When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains over the whole of the economy. Hard to quantify right now, especially because of all the noise going on. i.e. GDP is currently getting slaughtered for reasons other than lack of productive business practices. I do think that it's harder to notice from the vantage of tech since it is probably the most remote-ready industry. Talking to finance bros I get a very strong sense that people are getting a lot more done in some regards and suffering in others. When offices come back, they'll divide up the tasks appropriate to the milieu and gain some incremental productivity as a result.

Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance.

I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.

> When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains

But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.

Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.

"The commute" is a massive societal inefficiency. How many hours, how much time (and how much CO2) is just wasted?

Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day.

I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.

You've identified it. We're talking about productivity gains, so that accountant gets as much done as they did before, minus the commute time. At a bare minimum, that's doing 8 hours of work in 8 hours, versus 8 hours of work in 10 hours, or whatever your commute is. People who drive (most people) cannot usually perform economic activity during their commute. Better yet, maybe that accountant figures that they really work for 4-6 hours of the day and the rest is kind of wasted on chitchat or looking busy. The autonomy to quietly get work done in less time will grant that worker even more hours in the day.

There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.

I think the economy and productivity and everything else that makes economy and work tick are way more complex than your simplification to no commute = massive gains for economy, companies and happy new future for everybody is coming.

I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its great. These people keep praising current state as the best invention since fire. Most companies aren't organized around that last time I checked.

Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes. That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are more effective.

There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.

Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see people tired from constant conf calls and full remote. Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone, people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means nothing compared to all this. For companies and for economies.

> There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.

It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.

Try to give a generous reading, we're speaking in short paragraphs on the internet. My argument was that a shortened commute is a real productivity increase. That's one of any number of hypotheticals that depend on industry by industry specifics.

If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues you and mattlondon raise are real—fitness, mental health, etc.—but those are temporary issues since people will eventually start going back to the office.

We will gain because through this experience, many firms will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to normal.

Future generations should be gaining an incalculable amount from the reduced fuel consumption resulting from the reduced travel and related consumption.

for me the no commute is huge. I went from putting more than 200 miles a week on my car to barely doing that in a month (and a lot of that is just driving for pleasure). I used to spend $120-150 a month on gas; now I don't even visit a gas station every month. I'm also cooking lunch at home instead of going out several times a week for mediocre takeout. saves me a good chunk of change and I'm eating healthier and tastier food.

> Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.

this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay up talking and playing video games with my friends that live further west. not very productive, but I value having a slightly more relaxed work week.

> I'm also cooking lunch at home instead of going out several times a week for mediocre takeout. saves me a good chunk of change and I'm eating healthier and tastier food.

I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among other things, went into what ways of doing things forced by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what they didn't want to carry forward.

A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.

You are free to spend that time however you like. I get to sleep for three hours longer. Needless to say i produce a lot more code these days.

> The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices.

You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?

Remote work is massively inefficient for some things, even if it is much more efficient for others. Smart firms will do the efficient thing in the most efficient place and see gains across the board as a result.

So...practically none of them...?

Because I know we're not going to get SnackNation forever.

I think we'll find that not every company does need an office, or the expense of an office.

IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.

Regus’ parent company just filed for creditor protection.

Oh, shame, perhaps my thoughts on this are a little premature...

Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They aren't needed there.

Sounds like you’re arguing for WeWork not offices as usual.

We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs.

We need co-working spaces sometimes.

Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that

There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be.

Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice.

My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.

No. I'm saying many (most) firms will still require offices. The shape of the office will change as firms realize which business functions work best in the office and which are best remote. This will take many years to shake out because not every firm will correctly identify these functions.

Yes back to individual offices

We need spaces built for working. Contemporary open offices are built for talking.

If anything, I'd expect offices more built around sometimes meeting and collaborating--not butts in seats all day. I can imagine hot-desking plus a lot of enclaves and meeting rooms.

Hot desking is a damn plague on offices, and the reason WFH has been so nice. No hot-desking. My space is my own and I can make it the way I want, leave what I want around and not worry about theft etc.

If, as some are suggesting, a lot of people end up coming into the office one or two days a week, how could hot desking not be widely adopted?

I am not sure I think covid will for force a rethink of the cramped open plan hot desking trend of the last - so you might have less desks in the same footage