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Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

I've been working remote for about 10 years.

I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed.

There are tons of good ways to do it.

Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks should be and where my browser dev tools should sit.

Surely there are more optimal ways of doing stuff. Odds are that there is a Taylorist approach that would pull more productivity out of me. But much like my typing speed (~50WPM) isn't really the limiting factor in my programming skill, screen real estate isn't a big factor in getting stuff done for me.

But the big thing for me is that, in the end, it's fine for me to switch stuff up on a monthly or quarterly or yearly basis.

I could never have done that when I was in an office. I couldn't take 20 min and play banjo or accordion and come back to my problem with a fresh eye. I couldn't put on my laundry and hang it up while I listen to other folks on the daily stand up. I couldn't start my lunch cooking in the instapot while waiting for a script to finish running.

It would take a hard, hard sell to get me back in an office, not matter how much real and legitimate enjoyment and utility other folks get in an office.

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That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true.

However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynamically and in an unordered fashion, as opposed to structured meetings, schedules and planning that become necessary in fully remote teams.

Then there's the social part. At least don't forget to do regular meetups in real life if you can.

Honestly, I'm very divided over this. Is there a way to have the spontaneity and dynamism of working in small teams in real life, and have the comfort and freedom of working from home?

You can have that remotely. In my team we (8 people) spend our whole day on a visio conference room. We’re mainly idle but we use it to ask for help, discuss decisions informally, vent, talk about whatever(games, movies, etc.), all of that exactly the same as in the open space, but better because we can still disconnect if we need to focus.

If we need a real meeting or need to talk with a specific subject, we just go to another conference room, in the same way we’d use a meeting room in the office.

The thing though is that we have a dedicated device for the visio. For now it’s a Cisco DX but it could work with an iPad for example.

Are you not self conscious, constantly?

The massive difference between what you describe and sitting in person is body noise. A cough in an office is normal while a cough in a video chat gets everyone’s attention.

I feel like it would be very draining but it sounds like you’re enjoying it?

I usually use Push-To-Talk mode on most video calls when I can. I'm not perfect about it, but I do manage to mute probably 90% of throat-clearing noises or 75% of my typing.

We just mute ourselves when we’re not talking an close the camera lid if we’re not comfortable with it.

I used to be self conscious about it, but I think the company culture plays a role. We had these devices and this behavior way before COVID because our teams were already remote (5 people in a city in France, 2 in another, 2 in Tunisia…), this is the company way of keeping remote people close to one another. The whole company works like this because all the teas are distributed. I went from not caring about it to loving it, and if I switched company I would do my best to advocate for such a system.

> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously.

Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the product of teams significantly larger. A brilliant idea gets you 5% of the way, the rest is getting busy with very boring details and corner cases.

My small teams and startup experience: none of that boring work gets done as soon as there are two people together. Simply put, social interaction is way nicer than boring work. This is not just technical development work, but even commercial research. I know this is a thought crime, but I sometimes feel like it would be a good idea to lock the socialite sales person in a room with no human contact whatsoever until they finish that Excel spreadsheet.

> Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting?

Reminds me of the time I worked at an early stage startup. I used to take official vacation time, and disappear from company collaboration tools to get real work done.

I find this incredibly sad for many reasons.

Taking time off to work for the company that doesn't let you work for them during normal work hours.

The irony is so strong but I understand the sentiment and why you'd do it

Doesn't let you do the work that you want to do*

The thinking and talking is still work

I used to take sick days for that reason when I worked in an open office space. Then, I realized how dumb that was and quit that job.

That's the biggest red flag I've seen in a long time.

Did not expect to find someone who does the same thing as me. I am actually kind of embarrassed I’ve taken sick days just to work without interruption or to investigate some tech I wouldn’t get company time to research (“we need you pumping out code, whats learning? You already know everything you’ll ever need!”)

That’s really awful. These companies shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I mean, of course they always will, but many exist that aren’t like this.

Ugh, me too. These are really dark memories though.

>Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting?

In a start-up ? You around midnight. Believe in the mission bro.

I’ve worked passed midnight maybe twice in my 3 years working at startups. Both times it was because I wanted to get something done not because the founder asked. Some times I wake up in the middle of the night and, with nothing else to do, start working on something but it’s only because I want my equity to be worth something (nothing or everything) as quickly as possible so I can move on: not because I have to do these things.

> Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting?

From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent.

But it is also important to be aware of what's going on in the company. Not just what you are doing but also why. Everyone can take part in decision making which happens during the day spontaneously. Or at least be aware of the process. From my observations: if done right, this kind of environments can be super productive.

> the much hated "agile" culture

I never got on well with Scrum, especially with the way it has become synonymous with “agile”. Really a shame that “agile” which focused on people has been swamped as a term by Scrum which is process process process.

Right, thanks for the correction, I meant Scrum of course.

Scrum isn't bad, but there are better agile processes. Most people doing scrum don't really do retrospectives and make changes to the process. In a large company this isn't really reasonable as there needs to be some process in common with each team, and the processes you most need to change in scrum are the ones that can only be changed if every team does it at once.

I favor kanban processes - it locks in less at an organizational level and thus allows more freedom to make changes for the team. Though in my experience there is less change needed in the first place because the only processes specified are the ones that are locked in and everything else is whatever it takes to make it work.

Your thinking is part of the problem.

Agile is rooted on focusing on people. Make a group of good people and empower them and they will create a process that works well. Also on the cases the process fail, they will change it. But if you go and decide the process, that's more than half the way towards a failure already.

What you propose works in a small organization - which is the type of place where scrum was created and works well. In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes for that to work. Any individual change might be good, but they conflict and nobody can track what you are supposed to do now. That is why large organizations are so hard to change.

Agile focusing on people is a good thing. People are number one, but agile has always acknowledged the roll of processes.

> In a large organization there would be too many people trying to make conflicting changes

Ideally, even in a large organization, it should still be structured down into small teams that can self-manage. You'll end up with Conway's Law taking effect, but you'll also alleviate the O(n^2) communication problem. In my experience, it works a lot smoother than 50 person teams where everyone's tripping over each other all the time.

> From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent.

When I was working in a startup, we did a "hybrid wfh" thing: we knew when we were about to have something requiring our full attention and would work one (or multiple) days from home. We had Google chat (or whatever it was called at the time) for anything that could handle a delay in response and the phone for anything that needed a chat right away.

At the time, the office was in a kind of co-working space, so it was a particularly hellish combination of open-space and multiple companies, complete with people unaware of their phones' silent mode. The upside was that even for regular work, productivity skyrocketed when we were home, so the founder, who initially was against this, started warming up to the arrangement.

More broadly, I think that different jobs have different requirements. I hate it when people talk around me and find it harder to focus. I never got used to this even after multiple years. And while I love listening to music, even while working, I don't enjoy wearing headphones all day long. I'm wearing glasses, so bigger headphones start to hurt after a while and in-ears are pain to put back in after every interruption.

Also, headphones cut you off from the surrounding discussion (that's the point, right?) so the whole "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" kinda falls flat, doesn't it?

> "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day"

This is a good thing if the spontaneous decisions are always and only the ones that are important to you. This is a bad thing if there is any other decision. In a shared multiple companies space the only decision that matters to you is "where should we go for lunch" (they might not work with you, but you can still eat lunch with them). In a company only space it is better, but there are still a lot that don't matter to you. If it is a team only shared space most of the decisions matter to you.

> I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture

Lowercase agile culture is not hated. What's hated is usually completely wrong implementation of that idea and cargo-cultism.

Even more so, the whole industry of capital-case Agile.

Huh. During my undergrad, one of the most time-consuming courses was almost entirely pair programming. Having another person there to pull you back on track when you get distracted, and vice versa, was definitely a productivity improvement. Also less time wasted going down the wrong rabbit hole.

The chance that one of us was feeling motivated to put in the work to deal with that corner case is higher than the same chance for either of us individually. Though I guess it depends if the distracted person is more able to derail the other person, vs being pulled back on track.

> Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting?

You do it in the meeting, while others discuss things that aren't your concern. If it's something hard you really need to focus on, you tell the others to either shut up for a bit, or lend their eyeballs for a while.

Also, the boring stuff gets done just fine in a group everyone getting their last month's pay depends on it.

Been there, on both counts. The only thing I miss about it is how much you get done, compared to being a €€€ consultant tied to a spot with red tape.

Maybe “meeting” has the wrong shade of meaning here. The comparison isn’t to a pro-forma “let’s sit down for 30 minutes and focus on discussing this” meeting. It’s more to a “war room” continuous-until-it’s-fixed meeting that happens in response to an incident:

• bringing all stakeholders together with exactly one goal (in a startup-as-meeting, that’s “finding product-market fit”),

• where everyone in the room has domain expertise and heavily-overlapping capabilities;

• and any non-shared knowledge relevant to solving the problem that each stakeholder brings in with them, is immediately pulled out and put on the table, until there is formed a complete shared understanding of the problem,

• and micro-tasks / “there’s always another thing” tasks are then being greedy-scheduled by whoever’s free and able jumping to take them on next;

• with everyone keeping track well-enough of what the solution-space for each task is looking like, that at any time the person working on a task can drop it to work on something else more urgent+suited to them, and someone else will be able to immediately pick up that task — not because the other person had the time to document everything and make onboarding to the solution-space easy for them, but rather because everyone was learning all they could about everything everyone else was doing in expectation that they might have to jump in.

In regular work, you do heads-down work and then you explicitly decide to “have a meeting”, which interrupts your heads-down work for a while. In a war room, you’re always “in” the continuous meeting, and people explicitly decide to break off to do heads-down work while the meeting continues around them. (Usually with one ear open to notice if they need to jump back in and contribute/adjust the course of the plans being made.)

For extremely-early-stage startups (i.e. founders and no-one else), this is what every day looks like. Rather than dividing up the problem along lines of domain-expertise (a sort of human Service-Oriented Architecture for problem-solving, with single-person “departments”), you instead essentially act together as one “multi-core person” to solve problems.

IMHO, if this isn’t how most hours of the day at your early-stage startup look, then you either don’t have the right founders, or you don’t have enough shipping pressure (i.e. “too much” runway.)

War room is an excellent term in this case, thank you. Going to use it from now on. And this:

> Usually with one ear open to notice if they need to jump back in and contribute/adjust the course of the plans being made.

is precisely what I was trying to describe here in the comments. Thanks again.

I think that small teams with high throughput communication can work in place and remote. In place the high communication is there by default where the default remote position would probably be lower communication / more isolation. It doesn't have to be this way of course, but it would require the remote high communication model to be put into action intentionally.

It's worth remembering that this high communication method isn't really scalable too, and that larger teams trying to follow it will find themselves dedicating a larger % of their time to noise. It would take some intentional actions to move away from it as the team grows.

> this high communication method isn't really scalable too

True, from what I've seen the threshold lies somewhere at 10-12 people, assuming a mixed team engineering + marketing + etc.

But while you are small you can take advantage, remove all formalities and be in-place as much as possible. You can move so much faster, having trivial respect and ethics in mind, as in don't talk loudly about sales just next to an engineer who seems to be working on something. And vice versa.

I'm also divided, and I still go to office because of that (at the moment we can sort of choose it ourselves), 1 or 2 days a week. Sometimes 0. I enjoy the time in the office, I see who is there, try to gather a big group for a good lunch and talk as much as I can. At home I focus on coding, document writing etc. I'm all for letting teams hash it out among themselves.

One argument that I think fails in the long run is that creativity drops. Maybe it does, in the short term, but if people are happier at home, and more companies will support it, new ways of being creative or even together will be found. I wouldn't worry so much about losing the "classic, old" way creativity worked before, there is so much to be gained and so much yet to be learned. Give it some time, embrace it, see where it takes us.

One example of growing creativity for me has been: One colleague in our team is from the US, he's the only one. Pre-Covid he'd be on a speaker in our meeting room, no cam on. Since Covid he has his cam on, same as everyone else. We engage much more in small talk, recently we got a tour of his house and garden via webcam. What a nice guy! We wrote some patents together now too. Even though we are 8 hours flying away from each other. The talent pool for teams just grows much bigger.

> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things

...and also makes a lot of people unable to focus.

I do not understand how people can get work done in an environment like this. I've had similar experiences and "the whole day is a meeting" only served me for unnecessary interruptions, useless workplace banter and unsatisfactory results.

I do think some work circumstances can benefit from periods of nearness.

Programming is not one of them. ;)

People who tilt towards extrovert thrive in an environment like this.

In my experience, reasons like "spontaneity" and "dynamism" are used to cast lack of vision, poor planning and management, and amateurish execution in a positive light. YMMV.

In my experience, reasons like "freedom to work from bed" and "ability to do laundry" are used to cast anti-social behavior in a positive light.

The solution to this is gather.town

Communication points are a bottleneck. Smaller teams help, but the ideal team size for accomplishing a task is 1.

Putting engineers in a war room or open office is only going to irritate the ones who want to spend their time doing deep work. And those are usually the better ones.

I work remote at an early stage startup, I’m not sure you’re right. It might be faster to work together but only by the amount of time it takes to type. We’re on slack talking all day and have video meeting when needed. We work fast as it is so I’m not sure we’d gain much by being in person (other than social stimulation.)

I'm in the same boat with the addition of a Mumble server. We're always a keypress away from talking to each other.

I work on site in an early stage startup, and I think it's about commitment to a communication model.

We have a 2x2 grid. On the top we have 'in person' and 'remote'. Down the side we have 'synchronous' and 'asynchronous'. I've worked in companies trying all five (yes) of these combinations. This is my experience.

- in person, synchronous: everything happens in meetings. Business likes the certainty of meetings, engineering doesn't like the disruption. With the right accommodations, most people are content.

- in person, asynchronous: everyone's in the office, and no-one knows why. The CEO offers vague maritime platitudes.

- remote, synchronous: "can you go on mute" now causes a company-wide gag reflex. Everyone's happy because they can apply for new jobs without being noticed. (Seriously, the company I worked in that did this had absurd turnover, for this reason.)

- remote, asynchronous: engineers contribute to discussion when they have time. Hotshot managers want there ideas validated now, though. Despite this contention, most people are happy.

- hybrid: A cabal has formed in the office. Finally, it formalizes when a Jira account named 'Office' appears. When a remote worker creates an issue, the cabal convenes to decide a response. There is no room for negotiation. Gradually, the remote staff evaporate. Only the hive mind remains.

the best of both worlds would be to work remotely most of the time and have (frequent?) sprints where you get to know your coworkers and also engage in this kind of high bandwidth settings.

You can reproduce it somewhat with an always open mic & video chat on all sides. I've done it once, it was remarkably effective.

Many people who like remote work although also do not like something like that arrangement although.

Look at the entire crypto space. $1.5T+ of value and growing and the vast majority of it is built remotely, sometimes anonymously, and it's one of the most free and spontaneous industries.

>>... play banjo or accordion

Being able to noodle on a guitar while stepping away from a problem is a super power for me. If you work from home, get an instrument you can distract yourself with. The music or drills can break you out of ruts, and if you do it half seriously, you can develop real skill.

The oh so serious kabuki show we all play out in offices, especially open plans, wastes a lot of mental energy on "professionalism" and decor. People get away with being good at that type of theater, instead of being competent problem solvers, or try to turn those things into leverage for internal politics and career maneuvering.

If people are doing knowledge work, then the privacy of their home gets rid of all the unnecessary play acting. Maybe the pandemic will demonstrate once and for all that an employee with a good work ethic can be lots more effective from home than at the office. And if we encourage music and creativity and development of other relaxation and focusing skills in service of optimizing mental acuity, that leads to a better world.

+1 and I like your writing style: “””The oh so serious kabuki show we all play out in offices, especially open plans, wastes a lot of mental energy on "professionalism" and decor.”””

==If people are doing knowledge work, then the privacy of their home gets rid of all the unnecessary play acting. ==

Except for all the hours you spend on video calls where people are looking directly into your home. If you use some type of background to blur your home, that becomes the same type of "kabuki show" you reference about offices.

==Maybe the pandemic will demonstrate once and for all that an employee with a good work ethic can be lots more effective from home than at the office. ==

Maybe you have a bias here? I know lots of people with "good work ethics" who feel less productive at home.

Getting asynchronous chores done like laundry, dishwashing, and cooking/baking are the best part of working from home.

Totally agree, I cook more food, learned more recipe, wash my clothes more frequently, my house is more clean and organized.

Contrasting to a 9-5 job, I would rather just order takeaways after getting back home from the office.

It’s great how everyone works so differently. When I am alone, working from home, I can’t find a proper mental break anywhere and everything becomes a mess and I eat worse. Having a physical work/life split makes me cook more food, learn more recipes, and gives me a constant fresh look at my home and items to make sure it’s clean and tidy.

In the WFH situation it’s suddenly 20:00 and I’m starving and just look to snack or even go so far as to order food, but when I work away from home I have the train ride back to browse which supermarket I’ll shop at and message with a friend on how and what we’ll each be making.

Have you tried setting alarms on your phone and when you start/stop go for a short walk?

One thing I do to separate work from home is to get changed. Wake up in underwear, lounge until work start alarm then get dressed/go for walk/start work - end of work alarm go for walk/get changed - helps me with the mindset of what is work and what is not.

I don’t always need to do this, just when it starts to affect me.

Can you create a work/life spilt by having a separate office in a separate part of the house?

Or even have an external office on the property.

If you knew you can work remotely 100% of the time, that frees you up to consider cheaper locations where you can get a better house for the same rent.

This. I like WFH as a concept, but I feel like it would require a separate office room to really work, and right now I don't have the space for that. Working from living room just mixes up work and leisure really badly.

I’m my case having a “separate office room” is just occupying the space where I might have had the family computer or my gaming station. I have always had that space, at least since the days of my ok’ packard bell and kings quest!

I intend this with all the charity in the world, but it does need to be blunt because comments like yours are influencing decision makers to force everyone to come back, whether it's full time or in a so-called "hybrid" model.

You've had a year and a half to adjust. If you don't want to move, you could easily rent office space near your home. Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for everyone who is happier and more productive at home.

That is a real problem. When I WFH, I do better when my customer supplies a secure laptop to access their systems. I use that laptop only for work, and simply turn it off at the end of work. During the day, I can grab my iPad if I have personal e-mail, etc.

WFH != unscheduled and sedentary.

You can set up timers e.g. pomodoro and do quick chores frequently.

[edit: care to explain the downvotes?]

This is the biggest improvement in my ‘quality of life’ from working from home. I’m still not totally convinced I don’t like working with others around me, but the ability to eat well, integrate exercise and chores into the breaks away from the screen i’d take in the office anyway are priceless.

Absolutely, 100%.

And I find too that it doesn't even reduce down your working time too - an awful lot of thinking time in an office is when you get up from your desk and walk to the watercooler, bathroom, whatever. I do so much thinking and working out whilst doing these home chores.

Personally I have a MUCH easier time paying attention if I busy my hands with something mindless like dishes. This has been ruined lately by me becoming the guy that runs the meetings, but hopefully I can change that soon since I really dislike running meetings and would much rather wash dishes.

Bringing up an anecdotal edge case, a couple years ago I have attended a viewing in a coworking space (Bricklane, London) where members had to sit on old recycled school chairs because that was the "design". Apparently you need to get a sciatica to look like a hipster coder.

Having the right setup is not only about making your brain more productive - it's about keeping your spine pain free. While my home office is set up for this purpose, only one company that I have worked with so far had this aspect in mind. In the past, I had to take days off because of terrible set ups and long work hours. Having a well positioned and large second monitor helps a lot.

You have much more control over this while designing your home office. Working from bed is not the way unless you're planning to marry a physiotherapist in the future.

This, this, a thousand times this.

Yep, plus I’ve already learned that (for me) doing work or study in bed means I’ll be either asleep or uncomfortable soon.

The chair thing is always amazing to me. I worked at a company that had crappy chairs (because they claimed they couldn't afford better).

One of my team decided that they needed a good chair for medical reasons and asked for it. They got a really nice chair.

I don't know if anyone complained, but it wasn't long before the whole team had really nice chairs. The cost was negligible compared to the morale boost, IMO. I don't think I ever looked at that chair without thinking, "Man, that's a good chair!"

When I got a new job that had crappy chairs, I bought myself a new chair right away without even asking. Whenever I upgraded, I'd give my old one to anyone on my team that wanted it. I don't know if they cared much, but it sure made me feel better.

Now imagine if you got an office with a door!

I saw once a guy sitting next to the door in a small crammed office. He would get hit by it from behind each time someone opened it. Must've been a marvellous experience, he quit rather quickly.

I think working from bed for a short time is a good way to keep varying your posture.

The headline is misleading because I would have answered that I work from bed sometimes, but I also work from every chair or position around the house. I have a laptop and I move around.

Working from bed is when I am trying to finish something that's not particularly challenging while also kind of watching the baseball game on TV.

> screen real estate isn't a big factor in getting stuff done for me

Lately, I've been wondering if less screen real estate actually makes me a better programmer.

Being able to simultaneously have 6 files open across two large monitors with a lot of vertical real estate means that messy code doesn't hurt me as much. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason I do that is to facilitate dealing with messy code. I no longer have to build a stable mental model of it in my head, because it's reasonably convenient to just keep referring back to the original source code.

When I'm just on the laptop screen, though, and I can fit one file full width, or two if I've been good about keeping the line length below 90, I start having to keep things in my short term memory. Which means that, when it's not amenable to that, I'm relatively quick to get annoyed and refactor it for comprehensibility. I'd like to think that, with time, I'd eventually come to just write more comprehensible code in the first place.

A couple more data points here, obviously riddled with bias, come from my colleagues. Some have desktop computers with multiple 4K monitors, some have a laptop connected to a single external monitor, and some have that and also a habit of unplugging the computer and working on the front porch whenever the weather is nice. My impression is that the people in the first group tend to write the least comprehensible code.

Of course, the 4K monitor jocks also tend to work the fastest. But I think it's maybe a bit like when I used to work for building contractor. Nobody liked to be on the same crew as the person who worked the fastest.

So it seems I accidentally nuked my Macbook pro two nights ago after my dog spilled a glass of water on my nightstand and splashed some onto MBP- I thought it was an indirect hit, but the next morning I plugged it in and appeared to have shorted some stuff out internally, and even worse- it seems to have shorted out my thunderbolt monitor too.

So I was forced to just use my Macbook Air, and I was preparing for a massive productivity hit, and tbh- I think it may have actually helped a bit- I don't think we realize how much we get distracted by having email and slack or whatever open all the time, and just being able to focus on one task at a time visually was actually kind of a relief.

Long term, I am going to want monitors back and all, but I think there is a real benefit to keeping the things that are not 100% your attention at that moment entirely minimized and out of view.

You’re really on to something here about systems thinking and the relative power of tools. I feel similarly about big IDEs and stateful, long-running test runners.

I've been using just one monitor for the last two years and never once wanted to go back to multiple monitors.

I used to have two external monitors and it was always frustrating to dock/undock and re-arrange my windows. That was why I transitioned. But I've seen no reason or negative impact on my work to drive me to return to multiple screens.

HackerNews often talks about how task switching and multi-tasking negatively affect focus. I wonder if those same people think multiple monitors contribute to either of those. On my screen I only ever have one window; it feels more intentional. On three screens I had email and teams on one, a browser on another, and my IDE on the third. Surely that's more distracting, no?

Initial Google results seem to sing the praises of multiple monitors. Am I truly unproductive on my one screen or have others seen the same benefits? How can "productivity" even be quantified?

This is spot on. The 'bottleneck' in programming is not the screen size or typing speed but the I/O of information in the brain.

I too stopped using multiple screens some time ago because it felt like being overwhelmed with information and experiencing fatigue, while not being more productive.

I stopped using multiple screens, but only because my 4K (at home) and ultrawide (in the office) can fit everything I need. I wouldn’t do the same with 1080p.

I've been working from home 20 years now, and I have the opposite setup from you. I've got a much nicer setup then I ever had in offices - from 3 monitors to my favorite keyboards. As I get older and my eyes get worse, I really appreciate the space the monitors give me.

I do agree about going back to an office... Its not really something I anticipate doing.

~10 years WFH here and my approach is similar to yours - my home office has become almost ludicrously well equipped.

My approach is that I think about how much commuting would cost me, and consider that a reasonable amount to invest in my working space at home. As a result, I have a very small, but very functional space that I feel good about sitting in for 8 hours a day. I'm comfortable, I'm calm, and when I need to think, I don't feel stressed by my environment.

Edit: to give some examples - I have very carefully chosen art for the walls that I can stare at and my mind can drift, when I need to solve problems. I had a desk custom made to give me the most amount of space because this is a very small room (~3m x ~2.5m) that regular desks can't make the best use of. I have great audio gear (mic, headphones and speakers), carefully tuned lighting, etc, etc. In isolation the thousands I've spent on this room seems kind-of ridiculous, but compared to the thousands more I haven't spent on commuting and compared to the satisfaction I get when sitting in here, I think it was absolutely worth it, and I am very grateful that I was privileged enough to be able to make all these choices.

I've gone the opposite way. I did WFH/remote for ... years, always on a single laptop. I was very mobile - f2f client meetings, work from coffee shop, work from hotels, etc.

In the last year, as travel/f2f was essentially taken off the table, I've moved to laptop with 2 external monitors, and just recently to 'desktop' setup. I still have the laptop, and use it to work from home now and then, but I'm slowly getting used to more screen real estate. It's not even so much 2 monitors, just a much larger main one. 32" vs the 15" has been a big difference, mostly for the better.

But... I had years of comments from a lot of folks about "no idea how you can get anything done from just one laptop - that screen is so small, etc."

I've done WFH for a year and a half now (and the odd day in the years before that), and I still kinda struggle; it's easy to let the distractions take hold, and it costs me energy to get started on work. Mind you, the work is not the most exciting at the moment either.

That said, as other commenters have mentioned, there is value (for me) to work in a team and to have others actually depend on me and my progress; I need a bit of external pressure. At the moment it's mainly self-pressure / self-motivation, which isn't the best.

I do think in the future I'll pursue jobs where I'm both independent but also replaceable, because at the moment I'm not replaceable so I don't feel like I can move on yet.

“ I'll pursue jobs where I'm both independent but also replaceable” I totally get the pressure felt when you’re not yet replaceable. At least from the responsible, not wishing to burn bridges vantage point. It can add stress because it means vacations are only half spent and makes other opportunities seem wrong to take because you know you’d be leaving the company in a bad state. And mind you this is at the same time as trying to spread as much knowledge around as possible. Small teams can make this more common.

> Surely there are more optimal ways of doing stuff. Odds are that there is a Taylorist approach that would pull more productivity out of me. But much like my typing speed (~50WPM) isn't really the limiting factor in my programming skill, screen real estate isn't a big factor in getting stuff done for me.

Your work habits suggest the best "Taylorist" improvement might just be to let you roam. Seems to be working best.

> I could never have done that when I was in an office. I couldn't take 20 min and play banjo or accordion and come back to my problem with a fresh eye.

I've seen music/game rooms at good companies. If a company can't set aside some space for breaks, that's a red flag.

Working from home only possible with experienced devs. Once you have lots of juniors, it's very difficult to coach them. Juniors need to be able to contact fellow devs randomly and not via a zoom call.

I’ve been mentoring two juniors at work and I prefer zoom actually. It’s a lot easier for me to share my screen with the both of them than it is to all huddle around my desk. If they run into a problem they ping me on slack and we hop on a call together. It’s not any harder than strolling over to my desk.

In Finland there used to be a culture of everyone from high school upwards living in chatrooms or IRC, so it has been extremely natural for people to "idle" on chat channels and interact naturally over those. I would say chat channels feel much more intimate and social environment to me than sitting in an office. Even when we worked in offices we had IRC or Slack or other channels open and interacted over those rather than by actually walking around and talking. It's simply much more effective, asynchronous, and leaves a log of what was said and agreed.

> I could never have done that when I was in an office. I couldn't take 20 min and play banjo or accordion and come back to my problem with a fresh eye

I mean ... you could.

“Oh that guy over there? He’s our chief architect. Don’t ruin his banjo break.”

I should say, "I wouldn't have felt free to do that in the situations I've been in".

And maybe that's just a supposition that I was making.

People pay me to play music-- it's not that I'm bad at it. But there are a lot of reasons ranging from not annoying other folks to not looking like I care more about playing scales than fixing a problem which make me think I should not do that kind of thing.

Right? Imagine having even a minimal amount of agency over your surroundings and immediate environment.

You have summarized the good experiences I have had working from home (except onsite for a while at Google and Capital One) since my wife and I moved to a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona in 1998.

I have two areas of my yard where I can work, one is always shady, I have a dedicated office, but also work in the living room and kitchen table. I have a nice external monitor on my desk, but I don’t really need it for most writing or work tasks.

> I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop;

How's your spine? my neck can't handle laptops any more.

I really don't know much in this area but this seems to be more of a posture thing. A physiotherapist told me he only uses laptops because apparently that's the best combined with the right table and chair due to the tilted, low screen.

In my experience he's at least not completely wrong, but in the long term I still aim to try a standing desk to mix it up, sooner or later sitting in general feels wrong when I overdo it. And I just prefer a single large screen. Enough to fit two windows beside each other with enough space for any situation.

I suspect the real problem is lack of movement. If you spend long periods of time in the same position no matter how good your posture is it is going to cause a problem.

To be honest, I am in better shape than I have ever been in my life, but that's cause I'm 43 and rock climb regularly.

IMO, core strength has been the big change in how my spine feels.

Best thing is to get an external keyboard, otherwise the screen will be too low and your neck will be perpetually craned downward (same issue with prolonged smartphone usage), or you set the laptop on a pedestal so it's eye level, but now your typing like a praying mantis.

I worked from home for around 15 years and I miss it tremendously. I think my productivity was much better when my "take a moment from work" diversions were exactly the things you described-- doing some laundry, washing some dishes, preparing lunch, etc.

I'm back in a traditional office setting. My diversions are mostly the "surf around on the Internet" variety. That's not to say random Internet use didn't happen when I worked at home, but I found I enjoyed random non-computer diversions far more than sitting viewing websites. Now that I'm in an office those non-computer diversions aren't an option. I just end up wasting time on websites when I need a break.

I also really, really miss working from my couch with my 15" laptop on my lap. It was vastly more comfortable than any desk setup I've ever had and discouraged me from hoarding physical articles in drawers, corners of a desk, etc.

I never understand the ability to work on a laptop. For me it would be a significant blow to my productivity. How do people do it?

I have 3 full monitors, one for running 10 or so processes that I can glance at stdout, then the other two monitors for having many different editor files open, numerous data plots, and multiple reference guides open, etc.

On windows I alt tab often. I close anything not related to work keeping the list of windows short (maybe 5 at most). Split screen some where appropriate.

My home office is 2 monitors. My work office is 3, however I only find myself using 2

Different engineers do different work. Not everyone is running 10+ processes and referring to reference guides all day, some, like myself, spend most of our days writing emails or reviewing PRs, neither of which really necessitate lots of screen real estate.

I have 8 full virtual desktops. I can switch screens without even moving my head.

Virtual desktops and 3 finger swipes for me too. I cannot understand how having multiple apps visible helps, because you have to continuously switch your eye focus and if you have distracting apps like Slack in your field it's even worse. So laptop with 1 window maximized is the best for me. And the mobility that it allows: move to the sofa, armchair, cafe, I even deployed from a taxi. I tried to buy and use external keyboard and trackpad on my standup desk during the pandemic, but I returned the same day - the distance between the position of keys and the trackpad was so weird after years of laptop only.

thinking about it, I'm probably really biased. I do robotics, so live analysis of sensors, processed data output running on a real platform as well as involved simulations is part of my process. I need to be able to glance at data and plots quickly without changing my current screen

For sure, one thing is setups are very personal and we shouldn't try to all normalize to the same one.

You're not looking at and digesting all of that information at once (unless you have an impressive dozen sets of eyes :) ). You're context switching, and you've found that the most productive way for you to context switch is to have everything fully available at a glance. For others, being able to switch at a literal glance is less productive and more taxing (those 10 process can be distracting!) so we use different tools or methods, like workspaces, tmux sessions, terminal tabs. I usually have three projects each loaded and available for attention at once with a key press, but I don't need (nor do I want) them actively visible alongside each other.

Here is my first hand experience from roughly 15 years of working from home at this point, with a little office time mixed in.

This is the right approach from an ergonomic standpoint - cycle through how you sit/stand while working and you’ll minimize a lot of joint issues. If some position is causing you issues, it’s easy to identify and effortless to switch. At minimum it isn’t healthy to sit for hours straight. It’s also easy to mix in a few workouts or use some sort of treadmill or stationary bike.

Years ago I went from 3 27” screens down to 1 12” MacBook and had no loss in productivity. I was primarily doing design and data analysis work. DPI and OS window management matters more unless you have vision issues.

I have a desk with dual monitors and a laptop dock where I do most of my work, but sometimes that just isn’t where I want to be. The biggest win is the flexibility, I can be in bed, on the sofa or outside and do the same stuff I do sat at my desk.

> I couldn't put on my laundry and hang it up while I listen to other folks on the daily stand up.

Yeah, there's a secret value in low level distractions: they prevent higher level distractions. When you go into a deep focus environment for that daily, chances are your mind will focus deeply on something entirely unrelated.

Just reading this got me thinking. Something may be obvious but I have yet to see anyone written or pointing it out.

Does Remote Work prevent burn out?

That's a mental thing and it's as easy as it gets to prevent it:

1. Your work is not your life.

2. Since it's not your life, don't get too invested in it.

3. Plan your free time ahead and fill it with stuff that makes you happy.

4. Eat good, sleep good, and Sport sport sport (from everything a good amount and not too much)

5. Don't take drugs on regular "recreational" basis (yes alcohol is especially included here)

6. If your away from work, don't think about it.

No, it's a tool, not a panacea.

If you are feeling disconnected from the value of your work, being away from other people doesn't reconnect you.

If you are fire-fighting one emergency after another, not seeing other people in vivo doesn't get you downtime.

Not at all. It might actually cause you to burnout if you begin to feel your work has encroached on your personal life. I went through a rough phase a while back because of this.

Not sure why you got downvoted; remote work has been awful for me mental health wise since COVID. Not every dev wants to sit at home all day while they work. The separation and social interaction are important for me.

> I couldn't put on my laundry and hang it up while I listen to other folks on the daily stand up.

I think stand-ups are useless.

Same, moving is key. I once was much in bed and it caused neck and headaches for month.

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