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Comment by spurdoman77 | Hacker News Reader

Trust issues. While 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity and 2% might actually turn nefarious while remote (steal company IPR or something like that). Or I would imagine thats what the fear is.

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People underestimate how unproductive (or nefarious) one can be in office.

I feel like it's much easier to not do anything when it looks like you're doing something at your desk all day. Mix in a few meetings and random chats, it's very easy to go incognito, productivity wise.

I think we've all had days where we've gotten to the office and had a problem we're working on that doesn't get solved that day. It is actually really taxing and feels really bad to not accomplish anything, as if you've wasted the day.

I've found that the ability to more strictly control distractions at home--not needing to deal with the pressure to chat with co-workers and eat lunch together, for example--has led to far, far fewer days of no-solution. At the same time, it becomes even hard to "give up" on that day's productivity and clock out, since there's no real leaving the office.

It's pretty easy to get two full time programming jobs and do both remotely.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

Being in the office at least ensures you're not in another office.

How? If I'm willing to work another job while I'm at my first job, no one would know if the code I'm working on my screen belongs to job #1 or job #2.

The employer could use screen monitoring, but then they could do that while I'm at home and see that either I'm working on a second project, or that my computer is idle for long periods of time when I'm supposedly "working".

Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?

I have so many meetings every day that I'm sure that I couldn't get away with working 2 jobs at once, even when fully remote.

Companies often make employees sign agreements stating they won't do work for a second company while on the first company's property or while using the first company's equipment. So if you were going into the office and using one company's computer for two jobs, something like that would probably apply.

> Though I'm not sure it matters - if I can work 2 jobs and still provide adequate productivity to each employer, then why do they care?

Measuring programming productivity per person is very hard.

Measuring 40 hour attendance is easy.

So while everyone agrees that A would be better, in reality the approximation of B will have to do.

Man, I would fail those screen time monitors so badly.

I still work out some things on paper—I think well that way. Other times I have to get up and walk around to work something out in my head. I'd look like a constant slacker.

Sure, you can't have two physical jobs at the same time, but I've worked in multiple offices with people with more than one job. It's almost a given that everyone has some sort of side hustle nowadays.

Plenty of people have productivity issues in the office and "steal" time there (slacking off), so it probably more than balances out.

> 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity

My experience has been almost the inverse of this. I wouldn't quite say 80% of people are less productive at home but I'd think at least above half? For various reasons mentioned elsewhere here (disruptive home environment, can't communicate effectively with co-workers remotely, etc). Many people just become very unproductive if they're not physically in the presence of other people being visibly productive.

I'd like to see some formal studies into this to get the true split.

Your made up numbers could be said for people working in an office. I had one exec ask me years ago when I was pushing to transition to remote friendly, "how would we know if someone was working when they are at home?" My response, "how do you we know they are working now?"

The numbers are probably close to the same in office too, only the 2% (or whatever percentage it is), ends up with more access to physical capital to steal in office.

Personally, I hope the future for work becomes as remote as possible as near to a 4 day week as possible.

Isn't this a process failure? At least for that hypothetical 18%. If you have a product roadmap with well-defined milestones and good weekly accountability, it should be clear very quickly if someone is underperforming. There may be people who don't want to work remotely, but that's again why having a flexible+hybrid WFH approach seems like the best of all worlds.

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