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Comment by ryan_j_naughton | Hacker News Reader

>Work-from-home as a perk has a negative cost

Negative cost but also negative revenue / productivity loss if not done properly.

Most data appears to show the hybrid model is the best for productivity. WFH several days a week, enabling focus and limiting distractions. Work from the office a couple days a week to enable coordination, connection, innovation, and alignment.

This forced experiment in 100% WFH was clearly bad for productivity. The reason tech companies provided so many perks in the past wasn't simply as a recruitment technique. A lot of it was to create an environment where workers worked longer hours and thus the firm got more productivity out of each worker. The cost-benefit analysis clearly supported that before. A caterer's salary is far lower than an engineer's.

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> This forced experiment in 100% WFH was clearly bad for productivity.

Could you link to some data that demonstrates that?

> A lot of it was to create an environment where workers worked longer hours and thus the firm got more productivity out of each worker.

"longer hours" "more productivity" is obviously false for the extremes. It is unclear what is the threshold when a programmer starts to introduce more issues than they fix.

It is hard to measure productivity for a programmer (e.g., what might be productive short-term may be counter-productive long-term).

> Most data appears to show the hybrid model is the best for productivity.

Can we see the data?

> Work from the office a couple days a week to enable coordination, connection, innovation, and alignment.

I see you are fully buzzword enabled.

> This forced experiment in 100% WFH was clearly bad for productivity.

"Clearly"?

Can you back up your dramatic claims with evidence?

When I worked at Google, it was so noisy that I did most of my work from home anyway, but showed up for a few hours a day because I had to.

As an ISP engineer, I can tell you my company has numbers and figures that we are much more productive in networking, applications teams and development, and a handful of other teams across the board by working remotely. Been selling off officespace all last year and continuing to do so. We do work more working from home. And all that said, they know full well what teams should be back in the office and those of us who could feasibly work permanently from home.

> A lot of it was to create an environment where workers worked longer hours and thus the firm got more productivity out of each worker

Also known as: working for free

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