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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I feel compelled to point out that WFH in the midst of a pandemic-inspired social media freakout, does not make for a productive state of mind (although I don't know if the social media situation is as bad in Japan as in the U.S. where I live). So it could be that WFH productivity would be better in non-pandemic times.

Nonetheless, and I say this as someone who is by no means opposed to WFH (I have often done it, depending on the contract), the results are not surprising. More work gets done in a dedicated space for work, surrounded by other people engaged in related work, and this is especially true if some of the team members are young and inexperienced. It's the same reason we have gyms for exercise, yoga studios for yoga, art studios for painting, and so on. I'm glad that these researchers tried to measure it, but the results are not at all surprising.

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> More work gets done in a dedicated space for work, surrounded by other people engaged in related work, and this is especially true if some of the team members are young and inexperienced.

More work gets done when you're tired from being up early for your commute, then the commute itself, and surrounded by distracting coworkers? Not for me, not ever again if I can help it.

Don’t forget the 5 coffee breaks, multi hour conference room meetings, lunch meetings, etc, that can take up half your work week if you give in to that sort of stuff.

Call me weird but it feels like those 5 coffee breaks gave me enough situational awareness to avoid 5 hours of meeting.

Most times it's out of your control, though. Someone else booked the meeting, a higher uo decided you should go, and those hours are lost.

My meeting load increased with wfh, what could normally be accomplished by walking by someones desk and chatting for 5 minutes now takes a dedicated meeting for 30 minutes. As it's a dedicated meeting it requires inviting a bunch of optional folks to ensure they feel like they had a voice in a decision/discussion. Finally this all requires scheduling into everyones swiss cheesed calendars.

In a modern tech company with all the wfh and productivity bells and whistles I now watch as my productive days vanish into 6 hours of meetings.

This is all true for me. Although one benefit is no more people dropping by for 5 minute chats. On the other other hand I miss those a bit.

Truth clearly lies in the middle. Maybe on average .. a workplace is a better concentration of means and dedication even though it's obvious that it's a very very inefficient place most of the time.

The truth lies in admitting actual productivity. He's claiming 0.68 or 5 hours and 26 minutes of productivity when WFH. That's a huge number to have both consistently and exceptionally. I bet the average person gets 2-3/day if they're honest about it.

Japan is also famous for its salarymen who will fall asleep at their desks to avoid leaving the office before their boss. Time in an office does not equal productivity.

The truth is almost never the average. (What's the average handedness of a population?) But it's a convenient aggregate despite a likely heterogeneous population.

How do you stay caffeinated at home?

Caffeine isn't really beneficial for work, right? Most of its effect is because it's addictive and you need to prevent the withdrawal. The point of a break is that it's an excuse to stand up and walk around.

True, the coffee is just one of the devices to take your mind off things. My ex-girlfriend had a dog and when she was sick I had to walk it 3 times a day. Even though by that time (shortly before our breakup) I didn't like her or her dog, the walks were extremely therapeutic.

All coffee and smoke breaks actually are aimed at taking a step back and gain some small extra energy to keep going.

> The point of a break is that it's an excuse to stand up and walk around.

I agree. And its value and time commitment needed does not change if you work from office or home.

You should definitely stand up and walk around even when working from home.

short commutes are better than working in a pajama straight from the bed.

I worked from home before the pandemic hit and been doing it on and off for 15 years, but I took the habit of going out for a walk before starting to work, it actually wakes me up for real and sharpens my thoughts.

It also forces me to dress and take care of my hygiene.

A thing that many home workers I know, adults like me, don't do everyday. Which is, IMO, a set back.

Now that due to the pandemic I am confined at home, I feel tired all day and my productivity has gone down, to the point that I have to work 7 or 8 hours a day, while 5 were enough before.

Suffering for waking up early for a commute is only a symptom of not being a morning person, I negotiate comfortable starting work hours in all my contracts and never had to wake up early in the past 10 years.

And you know the main reason the employer accepted it as a reasonable argument?

because out of the rush hour commuting is easier (which is actually true)

they never heard from me "I am late because the bus/subway/train/whatever was full"

In my experience distracting coworkers are a lot worse when you are online all day remotely: you can close the door, but can't block them on teams.

Finally: consider that the majority of people all over the World have much better work spaces than home offices.

Usually home offices for regular people suck and/or people live in small homes.

Especially in Japan or Europe.

one last bit: WFH workers that are less experienced have harder times getting a promotion than in presence.

I agree that deliberately breaking the work-from-home routine is helpful for mental and physical health. Not very sure that people need a bath every day though (there were studies showing that some soaps and shampoos are really bad for the skin so shouldn't be applied daily).

IMO working from home can even further destroy your work-life balance -- but only if you let it, which is sadly easy in these conditions. So I agree with you there, we have to get out of our way -- literally and figuratively -- to compensate for some negative WFH traits.

To the last bit about promotions, I like to think that things are how we -- anyone in a team lead or manager position now or in the future -- shape them to be.

It's sad thinking about a state of affairs where I would be biased towards the person in my team I see most often - either through better guidance/collaboration (affecting promotability over time) or mere water-cooler familiarity.

The commute doesn't have to tire you, if you do it only 2-3 days per week. Increased workspace flexibility might be one of the biggest wins from this period of forced WFH. I know the thing that tires me most is the boredom from a fixed routine.

IT is one of the best fields for working from home. You should consider that or we have a profound bias.

And, it's true that commuting and working in badly designed open office spaces are extremely bad for productivity.

On the other hand working in a group can be a lot more productive than alone in the home office even connected electronically because we are humans and need social stimulation, but this is not true for everybody.

We should not forget these points when commenting.

I'm human, and I need social stimulation. What I really dislike is forced social stimulation. I would go to an office, yes. But monthly, not daily.

Same here. I miss my colleagues. But my preferred intensity of contact would be having a lunch together. Only my family should get 8.5 hours of my time every day.

The average commute is 25 minutes, and this means many people have shorter commutes. Just how much is waking up ten minutes earlier going to crater your performance?

(If you are one of those poor souls with a 90 minute commute, I understand your pain, but you shouldn't try to generalize your experience)

I used to have a 10 minute walk to work, and it was great. I'd take 1-2 days WFH a month still because there was some work that simply needed no interruptions/distractions.

Now I have a 60-75 minute commute over underground, and I'm not looking forward to the return to the office. There's definitely aspects of working where I long for the office, but others where I'm glad for the solitude.

If we have to return 5 days a week I'll probably have to move and pay much more or have a tiny living space.

I value my time more than my comfort so am accepting of this, but it still frustrates me after living the afore mentioned dream.

I'd also note that I regularly start work an hour or two early since working from home - with >2hrs of commuting slashed from my day, if I get a good thought at breakfast why not bash it out?

When you're facing 12hrs as a baseline for your working day it's much less appealing to contribute outside that time.

Commutes are responsible for a 9.91% drop in hourly wages[1].

Also, the less time you spend commuting by automobile, the less likely you are to be involved in an expensive, injurious or deadly accident, especially if you're commuting while while you or others are tired in the morning, or are tired after working all day.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

I’d like to know the impact of people not getting sick as much. I haven’t been sick in a bee a year and it’s great. Almost all of my illnesses came from the workplace.

Just having to put on work clothes, do basic grooming, prepare food to take, etc., already adds more than 10 minutes, on top of whatever the commute is. Driving to work probably means 8-10 less hours of free time a week, all to go to an office and do the same exact thing I could do at home.

You dont do basic groomung and food preparation unless you go to the office?

Not necessarily before work anymore. If I need an extra hour of sleep, I can just set my alarm for 15 minutes before 9.

I can also now take a quick shower in the middle of the day when I need to get away from the screen to think.

Or I can make a granola bowl while I'm in a meeting. Or walk the dog, or do any number of low cognitive load things (especially for meetings that I'm expected to attend even when they are only tangential to my work).

Of course I do, but not at stable scheduled hours -- and it feels much more therapeutic this way.

Sometimes not?

For me it was less the commute time and more planning around traffic.

Even if the commute was 30 minutes (a good day), I'd usually need to buffer time to plan for being late due to traffic accidents and construction (frequent).

Switching to remote work gave me back at least an hour every morning, and at least 1.5 hours in the evening. Anecdotally this has led to massive performance and quality of life increases.

Exactly. It may take only 25 minutes.

But how many of the people making up this average leave home an hour earlier than most of us just to beat traffic?

How much buffer time is then also factored in, and wasted?

No even taking into account the cognitive and emotional cost of the commute.

i.e. the subway in Paris is full of stressed out people, stinks, is more or less reliable and makes an awful lot of stressful loud noises.

I’ve switched to cycling 2 years ago, and even when I get home drenched by the rain and frozen by the wind do I still not miss the "métro". At all.

And I’d bet driving can be quite stressful too.

Pretty sure you're the one generalizing here by specifically selecting the US. A fair number of countries[1] have a far longer commute.

Also consider overuse of cars is a big issue environmentally, while use of public transport tends to increase one's commute (bad schedules, detours).

[1]: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...

I was acutely aware of how my commute was affecting my lifestyle before WFH became widespread, if you think the only difference is waking up 10 minutes earlier you've lost your mind. You are the one generalizing here.

Not all commutes are created equal.

10 minutes in a car is far less pleasant (to me) than a 25 minute walk.

Also 25 minute commute means 50 minutes out of the day, every workday. That adds up.

Not to mention getting ready for the commute/getting settled back home which is easily at least half an hour every workday.

> Also 25 minute commute means 50 minutes out of the day, every workday.

Yes, that sums up to over 4 hours per week, i.e. half a working day.

I've never been more productive at work than during this pandemic. I don't want to be surrounded by an audio mælstrom thanks to open office (who actually thought this was a good idea?)

Coworkers and bosses ambling over to my desk for a "quick" interruption? Meetings that only make the meeting makers feel like they've accomplished something? No thanks.

I create a space of discipline at home with discipline. If the only thing keeping you from indulging in whatever Clubhouse-flavor-of-the-week distraction is the enforcement of order from above, you need to take a strong look at what is motivating you to work your job in the first place. I specifically exempt parents: my condolences for the chaos that must be to your peace.

We need to stop treating employees like automatons to be filled by the directives of middle management and start trusting them to produce.

I feel the opposite, productivity is poor or at best unpredictable when working from home.

There is a strong truth in looking at what motivates you though, for me it is just as much the interaction with colleagues working towards a common goal that is key. That goal is so much harder to accomplish in a WFH setting.

Other than that i very much agree that too many meetings is one of the biggest productivity killers.

I don't think any reasonable person will claim that office or WFH is universally better. Different strokes for different folks.

But IMO working from home did outline some inefficiencies in the office work that finally started getting more closely inspected (like the needless meetings).

That's not a universally accurate assessment. It all depends on the nature of the work, the nature of the on-site work environment, and the nature of the at-home work environment. (among other factors).

I have significantly less wasted time working from home. At work, if I have 2 or 3 meetings in a day, that day is practically wasted for other work between walking to the meeting (I work on a large multi-building site), waiting for everyone to arrive, etc. Then it seems like people never want to end a meeting until its scheduled stop time even if we're done after 20 minutes. Then I have to get back to my office... Zoom has changed all of that. Zero time wasted at the beginning or end, and people don't seem to have as much of a problem saying "all right that's all we have, see you later" and ending a meeting early.

I can also get a bit more sleep in the mornings because I don't have to get ready to leave the house, commute, park, get to my office, etc. When the end of the day comes, I'm already home, giving me an automatic hour of extra time each day. You can do a lot with 5 more hours of free time each week. I get to see my kids for more time, especially my youngest, who I watch, as my wife oversees distance learning for the other two.

Even with the added distractions of working with at home with kids present, This past year has been one of the most productive in my entire career.

I'm sure that mine is neither a unique experience, but also not how it works for everyone else. But the mindset that says it's mostly more productive to work on-site is why some places ban WFH, as mine did before the pandemic.

I do, however, agree that WFH is least likely to result in the same or higher level of productivity for junior staff.

Sorry.

*We* are not going back.

Not going back to long commutes. Open office plans and office politics.

Not going back to cheap lunch in a plastic/cardboard box that costs a lot.

Not going back to paying high rent in bad cities without any quality.

Not going back to frivolous meeting.

Now after almost 2 years we have proved that yes the company can be run remotely, several things that were "not possible" are and the ultimate thing:

We can choose where we want to live and with whom.

We are not going back as same we are not going back to cable anymore.

Two years? Did I miss something?

COVID-21.

Then Covid-22

Then ... ...

COVID++

Hear hear. Though I must say that I've only worked in an office for about three out of the last 20 years, so it'll be easy enough for me.

Office politics exist regardless

Not going back to paying developed-country wages.

Which started happening some 15 years ago when outsourcing development to India started getting traction.

But now add US developers in Ohio to the mix.

Speak for yourself. I’m in no way concerned about remote work depressing wages. Competition has always been global.

I work remotely for 10 full years now and this has always been specific to the employer and nothing else.

You think you are not...

You're not going to have a say in the matter, and I think you're going to be surprised at how many companies consider WFH to have been an unavoidable aberration from a status quo they intend to return to as quickly as possible.

Workers not having a say regarding working conditions? Sounds like a recipe for poor morale and productivity.

Depends how desperate the workers are. But I've known two companies now that lost 50% of their IT staff when they tried to enforce going back to an office so I don't think anyone can generalize.

People who have little choice will do as their employer commands. The rest will move on.

For me, I think it depends on the office layout/vibe vs. the home layout/vibe. I feel much more productive at home as I don't have to listen to all the conversations surrounding me and if a manager stopped by they would often feel compelled to say something. Communicating via email is much more deliberate. Also, it seems as though the places I've worked have opted to silo projects and give them to individuals in a way that minimizes collaboration. It's also nice for people that are invited to a number of meetings for things that don't directly affect them to be able to multi-task at those times.

I also think that being watched produces a certain level of anxiety that is counter-productive.

> I feel much more productive at home as I don't have to listen to all the conversations surrounding me

I know this isn't a problem for most people, but this is such a huge issue for me. If you are talking in my vicinity, my brain locks on to your speech and prevents me from thinking about anything else. Unless I am listening to someone else speaking that is closer to me / louder there is no way to mentally block this out. If I'm trying to program and someone is talking near me, my productivity drops by maybe 80%. I either put on noise cancelling headphones, ask people to talk elsewhere (which irritates people who don't understand), or get nothing done.

I dont think you’re alone in this at all, as evidenced by the prevalence of headphones in open plan areas.

Exactly, it makes it particularly difficult to do something new that requires creativity or intense thought.

Yes, and I think that so many internet conversations would benefit from an explicit reminder that "People are different", and "Groups of people (teams) are even more different", so we should bear in mind that any average has a wide standard deviation, likely spanning the positive and negative domains

> and this is especially true if some of the team members are young and inexperienced

I think this is the big one for me, at least with the experience of WFH for Covid, it is so much harder for people to ramp up and learn in a WFH situation, you can't just ask your neighbor about a weird compile issue, or why the IDE isn't able to run your tests and be helped promptly with them just showing you right away. Instead you ask in a Slack, get a slow churn of reponse, nothing helpful enough, so you then schedule an actual short meeting with someone else to walk you over it, etc. And this support doesn't naturally distribute like it would at the office, it seems it's always the same more senior person remotely who has to now help new members in these more formal ways.

I've also seen so much more just confusion around like, what to do, who's doing what, when to do it, etc. Getting everyone aligned and in-sync is much harder. And that adds a lot of overhead and creates a lot more churn I feel to projects.

On the flip side, when you have a clear task to do and you know what needs to be done and it doesn't depend on others, you can really crush through it. And you save a lot of time from commute, launches are faster, etc.

I've also found, appart from Covid, remote work is pretty nice in terms of work/life balance. You can make laundry while you work for example, saving you time in your day.

So I'm still a bit mixed feelings about WFH, I like some aspect of it, mostly no commute, convenience of being at home so I can easily cook my launches at launch time, do some laundry or have the oven repair person show up and manage them while I work and all that. But I also feel doing the actual day to day work is harder, the coordination overhead is pretty high, and everyone is more siloed, so anything that involves collaboration has more friction.

> More work gets done in a dedicated space for work, surrounded by other people engaged in related work

I don't think that first part ("dedicated space for work") is so significant.

In my experience working remotely answering bug bounty reports, what most helped with working was the presence of a chat channel containing the rest of the team. It was used, in part, to discuss or ask for help with difficult reports, but primarily for making fun of stupid reports. (One of my favorites in this category being "If I zoom in too far on your mobile app, the text starts to become blurry.")

That might not sound especially productive, but you can't do it if you're not looking at the reports. You could view the channel more abstractly as providing irregular notifications of the form "I just did some work" -- participating requires you to do some work, and that helps you keep working.

Why is it stupid? Vector fonts should render smoothly at all scales.

It might legitimately be a bug in the app, if you're on the UI team. It's stupid because it was reported to the security team, and it has no security implications whatever. Nobody pays UI bounties.

Users are going to use whatever mechanism to provide feedback that they find first. They don't know what's a security issue, what's a bug, what's a sales request, and what's a support request. All I can say is that I hope whatever system you use for collecting security reports is shared by those other teams, and you just change the "security" tag to "ui" and move on. Because if you don't do that, you know whoever is reading that "ui bug" queue also has a slack channel where they make fun of people filing security reports as ui bugs, and then proceed to drop them on the floor.

Always be careful about shipping your org chart.

Maybe you should pay UI bounties. You're certainly losing money if customers leave because your app sucks.

Well, did you forward it to the UI team...?

No, I marked it invalid and went on with my day. As the front line of security triage, I don't even work for the company and have no contacts on the UI team. You want me to escalate it to the internal head of security? It's not going to happen.

It’s not an escalation. This would rather be an opportunity to improve the triage process to account for cross functional bugs.

Funny I just said last week to my wife that I doubt I’d ever go back to a yoga studio and probably not a gym. It’s just so much more convenient and comfortable to do these things at home. Especially with kids around.

To each their own, but I'd point out that a huge reason people go to gyms/studios to work out is for the social and structured aspect of it, and there is a ton of evidence that working out with others or gym partners leads to much more consistent progress, statistically speaking. That is a big reason all of the recent Peloton and Peloton-esque programs fundamentally include a group social aspect.

I've always had the ability to work out from home, and during the pandemic I've pretty much had to, but I greatly prefer going to the gym. I'm really not social at all, but I just feel like I can get much more "in the zone" at a gym than my house.

The reason to go to the gym is because my kids are not there.

I love my daughter, and did just as much when she was a youngster, but I think many dedicated spaces are a benefit because they allow for greater focus, because the kids (or spouse or parent or...) are not there. I have seen no data on it, but I have the impression that experienced workers with no dependents do better in a WFH environment, than either new hires or people with family at home.

As a 41 y/o guy without kids I very much agree. I have my bad days when I can't focus well even if I am surrounded by complete silence but I am very grateful for no persistent distractions like kids when I can.

Plus many acquaintances of mine reported that they had to resort to making a small room in their apartment a dedicated home office which they had to lock in order to prevent distractions from their kids.

Different strokes and all but I will never return to an office to work there while at the same time me and my wife have been a complete and embarrassing failure doing a workout routine at home so we just accepted our flaws and started going to the gym regularly.

For some people like the two us, having a dedicated recreational space is motivating you to do the recreational activity. Trying to do it at home invokes thoughts like "What's the point? I'll inhale so much dust and smog, what's the healthy aspect of that?".

So for us it boiled down to a psychological lock which seems mostly bound to proper air and temperature conditioning at the gym.

Depends what you're going to the gym for. If it's just to lift weights, sure, reasonable safety precautions and you're good to go at home. If you're into martial arts, gyms are a hard requirement.

If you have the luxury of space to load up a rack and some dumbbells - but it doesn't sound realistic for most people. Plus gyms are everywhere these days - it's easy to slide them into work commute so you don't have the time overhead of going there/back.

I want the option, because one day my mind might change if I have a family, but right now I absolutely hate WFH as a new-grad. I feel like I've learned almost nothing since March (or if I have, it's taken way too long).

For junior positions WFH can definitely be sub-optimal but in my eyes it also trains the juniors to over-communicate when they are stuck or are in a need of a coaching session. It's a way to distinguish the people who are way too shy for their own career good.

It's less about communication, and more about not hating my job. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion I'd rather work in a bakery or something than WFH as a programmer, because I'd at least be around people.

Well, that's a separate thing though, right?

To be fair, I too could use some more socialization but not sure that work is the ideal vector for me. I'd rather have a less stressful job on my terms (in my home office) and/or with less hours and then just proceed and make my free time more pleasant around other people.

> It's the same reason we have gyms for exercise, yoga studios for yoga, art studios for painting

No. We have gyms for exercise because there is an economy of scale. Who wants to buy a rowing machine, weight machines, stair machines, etc.

Yoga studios are because people go there to have a class led by an instructor. And most artists don’t “go” to a studio, they have a place in their house.

For typing on a computer, there’s really not much requirement for an external place unless your house is such that you don’t have a desk in which to work.

There are multiple opportunities to lose and win in WFH, and it’s the sum of all things which we see; while sharing a physical space may come with productivity boosts, having a large amount of people travel or drive every day is also a negative for productivity.

We only have so much time in a day, and I’m not sure that the balance of productivity factors will continue to weigh obviously in the direction of in-office work.

> I feel compelled to point out that WFH in the midst of a pandemic-inspired social media freakout, does not make for a productive state of mind

Not to mention the constant "we lock / we don't lock", "kids go to school / kids don't go to school".

> So it could be that WFH productivity would be better in non-pandemic times.

I tend to think this is likely true. I also tend to think that WFH productivity is improving as people adjust to it. A lot of people who found themselves suddenly WFH had to setup a workspace, buy a decent chair,desk, etc. There were also mental adjustments. Now people are pretty used to it and it's become the new normal. Going back to an office (if we do that) is also going to mean a performance hit as well because people will have to adjust to that change. Any kind of major change is going to lead to a performance hit for a period of time as people adjust to it.

Not my experience at all. I am a lot more productive working from home.

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