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Comment by buzzdenver | Hacker News Reader

You're making the assumption that everybody in the office prefers working from home.

They didn't say anything about preference, they merely said output. Does people preferring to work from the office mean they are so much more productive so as to make up that cost? That's the question that we're faced with, and if the last few years are any indication, the answer seems to be "No".

This is definitely not universal. Our team switched to a soft hybrid model whereby we almost always work from the office, but use WFH for deliveries, snow days, kid sick days, etc. We did that as soon as the vaccine became widely available and it completely turbocharged our productivity. We delivered more in the first three months after coming back than the preceding year of fully-remote work.

That's interesting - and quite the opposite of what I've personally experienced and heard. Are you saying then that when the lockdown happened and your team was sent home your productivity tanked? What happened? What wasn't it addressed? What's caused your team's productivity to soar now?

We're building a highly specialized product (GNSS Radiooccultation). Its specialized enough that we have to rely on hiring people with generic skills and then developing the specialized skills to work in the domain. In essence, we are relying on internal on-the-job training to build up our team. Remote work failed for us for the same reasons that remote education has been failing everywhere: 1/4 to 1/2 of the job is adult professional education.

Makes sense. Seems like we can generalize this to if you're working in a niche area requiring lots of training to bring new hires up to speed then perhaps WFH isn't the best of environments? Going forward maybe your team needs to think through how to best do your onboarding. Maybe you would need to get together for a couple weeks (or have "high touch" time) and then go back to primarily working from home? It's something to think about.

I'm a big fan of hybrid, albeit default remote. But this is one example as to why. For most groups, most of the time remote is fine. There will be circumstances where there's no substitute for in person communication. You cite a great example.

For your situation I would imagine in a hypothetical example where your team composition stays steady for a long period of time you'd find that you required onsite less often. And in that case I'd advocate that defaulting back to remote is a good thing.

That sounds like a red flag for a poor remote work culture. Our company saw improvements in productivity going full remote.

> You're making the assumption that everybody in the office prefers working from home.

I don't see anything in the OP's comment that referred to any assumptions about peoples' preferences: they were addressing the practical wastefulness and harm to the world's environment from the office-working conventions we've 'conformed to' in the past.

You may prefer to commute to work, and sit in an office instead of somewhere else (doesn't necessarily need to be a home), but that doesn't affect the inherent environmental wastefulness of all this 'busy' activity.

I don't think the person you're replying to assumed anything about preferences - people can still prefer to work from the office, and still not have working from the office generate >10% boost in productivity... I think many of us see how various managers are pushing people to get back to the office, but I'm not sure the impact is really there. I suspect there are a lot of people who are far more effective at home than in the office, but it's my personal opinion sadly.

SO people that prefer the office get to ruin it for those that don't?

Then why can't they share a wework type office nearby their home instead of companies trying to utilize and manage all than space in the center of a city.

A challenge with coworking spaces can be that there's much less corporate privacy. Some companies don't care but others do.

He isn't making an assumption that everybody in the office prefers working from home. Where did you read that?

A comped coworking space is cheaper.

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