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Comment by leecarraher | Hacker News Reader

I think we will soon see a dip in productivity.whenever assessing trends, you should never base conclusions on outlier events and we are basing too much of the wfh success on this past year. A year when you couldn't go out and do things, when people feared for their jobs amid a global crisis and felt a call of duty to keep on working.

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A lot of managers seem to have an unshakeable convention that as soon as workers are no longer cattle-penned into an office that they'll turn into lazy slobs. As if the only thing stopping them from vegging out on the couch, eating ice cream and watching Jerry Springer during the work day is the watchful and benevolent gaze of their adult supervisors from across the open office floor plan.

Believe it or not, most professionals are actually still productive outside the panopticon. If anything, substantially more productive because of being in a pleasant environment of their choosing. The only reason I can think why so many refuse to accept this evidence is because a lot of middle managers add little value beyond daycare supervisor. Not all, but a lot.

There's a disturbing number of managers who's only metric for success seemed to be "well they're in the office on time".

A natural consequence of the peter principle. You get one mediocre manager with questionable methods of evaluating employees, they promote more people who succeed according to those criteria, and in turn evaluate people on the same criteria, while the people who care about productivity and other more meaningful metrics move on to greener pastures.

I was remote working before the pandemic, and once it hit and people had to be home, I started hearing this argument. I looked at people leaders and asked them how they dealt with people who weren’t delivering in the office, and why that would no longer work. People who slack off were doing it before at the Starbucks or through walks, Internet browsing, etc, but when they’re home you can’t look over their shoulder while they do it. What you can do is continue to look for them delivering or not, and if they are, who cares where they do it?

> as soon as workers are no longer cattle-penned into an office that they'll turn into lazy slobs

That's full on projecting. It's what they'd do.

I'm trying to figure out what options I'm going to be interested in to work part time once I have enough money to retire, because I'm always going to be making something. It's why I got into this industry in the first place, instead of getting a job trying to trick other people into doing work.

WFH people were more productive before the pandemic. There were just fewer of us. If anything, as everyone else learns how to be remote and to do it well, and the stress of the pandemic subsides, performance should increase to match those of us that have been doing it for years.

I can absolutely say that at the firm I work, we're moving to a hybrid model following COVID's WFH model. Surveys from across the business show that some people want to WFH all the time, some want to work from the office sometimes and others (like me) want to work in the office all the time.

We're having this conversation and discussion around what is best when it comes to WFH, but there's no perfect fit, it depends entirely on the type of job you have, your home situation and also your social needs.

Possible, but there's the counter-balancing fact that people have been amped up and stressed out the whole last year, they didn't have the hardware they needed or the processes in place to help them succeed, they were dealing with their kids being unexpectedly dumped in their laps, etc.

This time last year companies were scrambling because they were absolutely unprepared for the amount of VPN bandwidth and other resources that would be necessary to handle abruptly shifting their work-force remote.

If anything, I would expect things to go more smoothly, for the companies that don't hastily revert to the asses-in-seats paradigm.

Yeah, imagine if people could do the stuff that they were not allowed to this past year, and so many things had not been postponed. Productivity would be through many roofs

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