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Comment by fairity | Hacker News Reader

If this is true, we should already have data to support it (since many businesses have already fully transitioned back to the office). I haven’t seen any such data.

IMO, whether remote work is here to stay depends on two questions: 1) Where are employees more productive 2) How much of a pay cut are employees willing to take to work from home?

The answer to the first question is pretty clear to me. We will be more productive in the office, on average. Primarily bc it’s human nature to exert the least effort possible to obtain resources, and so over time, employees will find more ways to slack from home while looking productive. Though there are exceptions, companies will base their decisions on the average productivity of each potential policy.

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Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive?

Why should remote employees take a pay cut at all? After all their employer is saving a great deal of money on office space.

I think that is just the outcome that you inevitably get to if you start from the assumption that humans are lazy and just waiting to slack off and work back from there. If you believe that then work needs to be a prison to function.

I've seen this data too, but I don't think it's representative of post-covid WFH productivity because: 1) there are far fewer productivity distractions during COVID due to everyone being cooped up at home 2) people are still learning how to slack off while seeming productive 3) the novelty of WFH helps spur productivity

Among my early-20s friends, I don't think I've talked to a single person who thinks their office is running more effectively than it was before. If there is such a mountain of evidence, you should at least be able to point us to the foothills.

How many jobs do early 20’s people have to compare it with? They might also have a bias as it is their first job out of school and are excited about meeting other people.

Also the pandemic where 600k people died in the US alone might put a damper on things.

I mean, they were all working the same jobs for 2-4 years before the pandemic hit. They experienced the decrease in productivity first-hand.

And yeah, I'm sure the pandemic had am impact on the effectiveness of remote work. But I'm disputing the aforementioned "mountain of evidence" which I so far haven't been able to view from my vantage point.

There's a mountain of evidence that people self-report they're more productive. That's not to say there aren't elements of that which are true, but it's not entirely clear to me that remote employees can continue to be meaningfully more productive than those teams would be in a traditional office setting, especially once the world opens back up.

The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close, which was somewhat surprising to me, due in part the difficulties of formalizing previously ad-hoc communication patterns and in shared whiteboarding.

>The pandemic did give strong evidence that it was at least close,

And it may be worth noting a couple other things:

- A fair number of people didn't have a great working situation at home whether in terms of the lack of a good work area or childcare/teaching on the side

- Under normal circumstances, it's not 100% virtual versus in-office. Distributed teams routinely get together for on-sites/off-sites which can provide a lot of the collaboration and team-building that people are lamenting the loss of with remote

> Isn't there now a mountain of evidence, thanks to the pandemic, that remote employees were in fact more productive?

I never believed it to begin with. Seemed like a way to try to prop up confidence in markets, rather than hard science. Afaik, all organizations are horrible at measuring productivity.

My place of work had an all hands a few months into the pandemic where they basically said they were surprised how everything is running as usual/better while everyone was WFH. I honestly don't know what they expected. People are slacking off while at home, but people slacked off at work too. It was not uncommon for me to lose my entire morning in the office to people coming to asking a simple question that then turns into a 30+ min conversation about random bullshit.

I know some people doing 2-4 hours of work per day, getting 100% as much done as they did in the office, then playing with their kids or cooking or reading or making art or just watching TV while they leave work chat open. Many not in tech. Office work generally is full of slack and meaningless butt-in-seat time.

There are complaints/observations of this dating back to at least the 1950s (see the wasteful faux-activity pretending-to-be-busy office work described in Revolutionary Road, for instance—it could have been written today, except there'd be more email, and it doesn't read as one bit exaggerated) so it's not like modern office workers are wildly less industrious than their predecessors from The Greatest Generation or the Baby Boomers or whatever. Office work under a modern corporation or other bureaucracy is just largely BS, evidently by nature.

So there may be about the same work getting done, but possibly way less "work".

On average would need quite a bit of data to back that up.

Anecdotally for myself I can't imagine why I would ever return to an office unless it was a couple blocks from where I live. Even then I'd want a private office with a door, a couch, and a nice garden to sit in outside when I need some time to decompress and think.

I get the same amount of work done with far less stress working from home. No commute, no random noise, no people tapping me on the shoulder, fewer meetings, no small talk and awkward social situations.

I get more sleep and less stress. At least in my field, software development (and knowledge work in general), those two factors have the greatest impact on "productivity." [0] [1]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/99-101/

I think your reasons around productivity being greater in the office are valid. But there are lots of reasons why people can be more productive at home too. For example I can often concentrate better as there are fewer distractions. I can also take a quick 20 minute nap and then be productive for the rest of the day rather than sitting at my desk zombified for the whole afternoon because napping isn't socially acceptable, or there are no good places to nap.

This is a bigger advantage for a lot of us that is not widely represented in the usual "pros" of working remotely.

I can go for a springtime walk on the trails five minutes from my new place since I moved out of the Toronto downtown core. I couldn't have gotten out of my building inside of 15 minutes let alone to a wooded trail where I was living before.

I can also take a five minute break and play some guitar and clear my head rather than going to the cafeteria to buy overpriced coffee or just clicking around on nonsense online. And lunch is way cheaper, and less time-consuming.

It's really nice.

That said, I've never been one for so many of the pretences we entertain socially. There's an immense amount of overhead in managing those mores.

If workers are equally or more productive (and companies are saving money by offloading work space costs onto individual employees) why should the employees accept a pay cut at all?

I agree - all else equal, I think workers should expect a pay bump if they are indeed equally or more productive at home. I'm working under the assumption that they're less productive, in which case it's a matter of how to maximize the productivity to cost ratio (from the perspective of the company).

I think it depends on whether the job requires serious concentration. When I was working as a programmer, I was much more productive at home.

I'm no less a slacker than anyone else but I had deadlines to meet. Being at home meant I could largely exclude interruptions, pace around talking to myself to figure things out, and crank out code, which I enjoyed anyway. And if I also had to work days at the office, it gave me more room to slack off there, where it was harder to concentrate.

> 2) How much of a pay cut are employees willing to take to work from home?

Wh ... why? What about not coming into an office means that I should be paid less? A lot of companies have reduced their in-office capacity in the last year+, presumably slashing costs.

This seems to pivot on the archaic idea that if you're not in the office you're goofing off or something. I remember feeling that myself when I first worked with remote people a decade ago but at this point we should all kind of understand that work is work.

The reason is if I were an employer, I'd gladly cut your pay because there would be a line out the door once I consider people nation-wide, let alone internationally. As an employee, I'd gladly take your job at a fraction of your pay for the guarantee that I can be fully remote.

>What about not coming into an office means that I should be paid less?

Sometimes there are quality of life decisions that come to play. Not sure cut in pay from current job is what's at hand. If I am currently employeed at a job that requires >=1 hour commute each way, has added stress from management inadequacies, etc, but then a job opportunity presents itself that is closer to home (or even WFH) for less pay, a conversation about what that cut in pay would entail long term is definitely worth having in my head. Those 2 hours back from the stress of commuting is huge. New job might mean worse management, or it could be better. Grass isn't always greener.

Two of my largest clients have seen productivity gains of 15-20% depending on department during COVID. It’s yet to be seen if that level will hold as the job market opens back up, but it’s pretty clear that WFH is at minimum not decreasing productivity for most people.

Edit: supporting data: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/study-produ...

You’re viewing this entirely from the employer’s point of view, which doesn’t seem prudent considering the shortage of qualified programmers and what not. Whether or not people are more productive from home is a moot question when the worker says “I don’t care, I want to work from home, good luck replacing me in this market”.

> We will be more productive in the office, on average.

This is really going to vary by job description. I'm not sure what the "overall" facts may be, so perhaps you're still right. For certain though, some jobs are much more productive remotely.

I don’t think productivity comes from slacking, I think it comes from a communication tax. When you’re in the office you can just ask someone, at home you have to ask and wait and explain.

But this is also the cause of a lack of production. I have routinely been interrupted from what I was doing because someone just casually drops by to discuss whatever they felt like (might be work related, might not). As a developer, it takes time to get back to where you left off.[0]

While working from home, those interruptions are dropped to 0. Any questions must come from some form of slack/email/etc that can all be ignored until I'm ready to look at them.

[0]https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

You have the right personality for work-from-home. There are others who need that social interaction in order to be productive.

When I was in the office, most developers had headphones on when working and you wouldn't interrupt them at that time.

I definitely agree that if you're in the kind of role where you can turn off notifications and just put your head down and work, this has probably been a very productive year.

What about the gains from those not having to pay the tax ? Being interrupted and having to do context switches has a significant cost associated.

What about the communication tax of people asking instead of Googling to solve their issue?

If I am more productive why would I take a paycut?

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