Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnuser847 | Hacker News Reader

When I’ve asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work, the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with me. Publicly everyone says they’re more productive being remote. Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered, being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation between work and home life makes both realms more difficult.

I definitely empathize with the answers I’ve heard. I like convenience of not having to spend hours commuting back and the forth, and being home so I can help my wife take care of our five month old baby. But if I’m being totally honest, my productivity is pretty poor compared to what it was when everybody worked in person from the same office.

View on HN

Remote != home.

Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration ability, and will power.

For a long time I’ve worked from a coworking place near my house.

Before that, when I wasn’t earning as much, I’d work from cafes.

Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay home and work from home.

Now I have a kid, and I’m forced to work from home due to corona, and my productivity definitely suffers. But I’m being extra aggressively defensive for my work space, and that helps!

> Remote != home.

While technically true, I have yet to talk to a remote candidate or employee who doesn’t work from home.

We had one candidate who wanted us to pay for a monthly remote office for them, but it was curiously expensive for some reason and he had other problems that ended the interview process early so I never followed up on it.

So basically, remote should be assumed to be at home.

My team is distributed, I work out of a coworking space less than a mile from my house (15 minute walk). It's made my mental/emotional state so much better (not to mention how much more productive I am).

We offer all employees the choice to work from home or rent a coworking space, and in either case we cover the cost (home office setup, or coworking cost).

I think what most people don't understand is what we went through with covid isn't normal remote work. In normal circumstances, you can work from a coworking space. And you can have an active social life. Etc. Etc. Your kids aren't stuck at home with you. Covid forced a version of remote work that was much worse.

Just as another data point, I work remotely and I have an office about 3 miles from my house. It makes separation of work and life MUCH easier.

I realize this isn’t normal but it is a much better way of working for me. I think if others could get past paying rent to work remotely that they would generally agree, too.

Coworking space is rather a big-city amenity, while the point of remote working for many people is to avoid big cities.

Coworking doesn’t have to be an official business.

Coworking = people working together. You can self organize.

At one time, I just rented a desk space at a software agency. They rented a larger than necessary space for growth, and we’re happy to rent it out. I was there for 2 years before they filled up.

Many offices have empty seats and small business prefer to save ;)

Also known people who have rented an apartment together and just set up desks there. The legalities of that are murky. But if you don’t disturb anyone around you nobody cares in a large building.

Personally I enjoy going to the office most days, even thought I don't have to. And know plenty people that do as well.

What I hope comes out of all these pandemic adjustments, is more diversity in work modalities to choose from instead only one or the other. That remote employers and employees get better working that way and that on-site/hybrid employees put more effort into making themselves more attractive. E.g. instead of having one massive, packed HQ everyone has to commute to, have smaller and more quieter spaces scattered around, having rules on not allowing taking calls on desk, etc..

I think that companies will need to diverge on whether they are remote or whether they are in office. I did hybrid for a while at my last company and it amounted to people being in the office most days just taking Zoom calls at their desks.

That is not satisfying to anyone.

I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same.

I keep seeing this narrative that the pandemic forced everyone to try remote work and surprise! productivity went up. I really, really doubt it.

What actually happened is that you had sufficient organizational momentum to keep things going. Your rate of actual creative work (big new stuff launched, etc) has almost certainly cratered. Your new employees are all struggling. If you've had a spike in turnover, the company as a whole is probably struggling. But it's invisible, because you can't keep your finger on the cultural pulse of the company without an office for that culture to manifest in.

I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code reviews given, and number of features released. All of these metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5 years. While this might not be the experience at every workplace, as far as I can tell, my workplace seems to have greatly benefitted from more remote work.

Apart from your first and last metric, all of those are measuring "use of remote communication tools", it would be scary if they went down.

(The first and last are interesting though and support your claim.)

I would disagree I am personally more productive at home and I love being able to just focus on code without half my brain being distracted by the context of an office. However, I think it's much harder for new employees and weaker engineers because it's difficult to get help/share screen/etc. It's also easy for slackers to slide by which I think just means you need better managers. I also miss the comradery a bit and in-office employees felt like actual friends.

I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that from home; the last couple from a small office space that I rent down the street from home. I worked in open plan offices for about 15 years prior to going remote.

Both situations are a mixed bag. There are productive days and heavily distracted days in a shared office and there are productive and not so productive days working remotely. Working remotely but not from home is the easy winner for me in terms of overall productivity with a much higher percentage of productive days. Working from home (before the pandemic, when my partner also started working from home) was still significantly better than working in an open plan office, though it did take me the first couple years to work out that I had to be very strict about keeping a separation (work machine gets turned off at 5pm and no work email can reach me outside working hours). When the pandemic hit and my partner started working from home as well (and she's a university professor so it was a lot of loud video calls while she taught her classes), my productivity crashed (but also, pandemic stress). If your home is distracting than, yeah, your productivity is going to crater. But the same is really true for something like an open plan office (I used to get most of my work done by going in extremely early so I could have two productive hours a day before everyone else showed up).

The key factor is what your home environment is like. If you have kids, then very possibly you can be a lot more productive at an office. Likewise if you live in a small place and don't have a comfortable, dedicated space to work in.

I’d be very careful how much you read into this because it’s begging for confirmation bias.

There’s also a difference between working remotely and being thrown into working remotely at the last minute during a pandemic with no prior experience. I’ve been remote for the last 10 years and the vast majority of problems you mentioned get better over time if you work at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com