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Comment by fgblanch | Hacker News Reader

Many assumptions in your statement. You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself and record profits come at specific context, specific time and based on a historic inertia and multi-year strategy.

This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.

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I can, because I go into office twice a week now. The days I am least productive are the ones I go in, because I lose more than the two hours of door to door commute every day. It is the fact that I lose my most productive hours of the day in waking up, getting ready, fixing a breakfast, getting myself to the office and having to small talk with people before FINALLY I can work.

Then you are accepting that what drags your productivity down is commuting, not actually working from an office. Remote working may be a solution to your problem but comes with associated costs you may be not counting (misunderstandings, wrong team member mental models, alignment calls, longer on boarding times, suboptimal knowledge sharing, less serendipity/synergies in general). Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place

I agree. However I still support work from home because it’s not up to me as an employee to fight for something that benefits the company at my own expense.

Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.

On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.

If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.

> Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place

A solution that may depend on first resolving the housing crises in many tech hub cities.

I'm confused how any of those downsides are resolved coming into work? All of those things are just as liable to happen in person. To be honest meetings are a lot more to the point when done remotely. In person the first and last 10 minutes of a meeting are spent just pissing away the time on whatever, the presenters dog did something funny this morning perhaps. If you are having issues with onboarding team members or getting everyone on the same page, just have them meet more often over zoom to discuss projects. Having them come into the office comes with this assumption that people will meet up and help eachother and be productive etc, but in my experience most office chitchat is not relevant to work at all.

There are also associated gains for an employer. The office rent is a massive one, for example. It is not clear to me which one is bigger.

Productivity is hard to mature, and the more senior someone is, the more their job involves communication vs production. Communication in person is different, so while companies can be remote, and that can work well, the prices sometimes paid are subtle and hard to see/measure.

It’s fairly easy for most people to compare their own productivity before and after working from home. Mine is significantly greater. The number of hours I’ve spent working has drastically increased due to losing my 2 hour commute, and the focus I’ve been able to achieve at home is like nothing I’ve ever seen at an office.

Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.

There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)

Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.

Communication is great for organizations, but I don't understand what you are getting in person that you don't get over zoom talking about whatever you need to talk about. It's not like the entire org is talking to eachother at once in person. At best you talk to like a handful of people a day, probably a good amount of that talk has nothing to do with work. Meanwhile with zoom I've been having so many more directed meetings with key people. Like before, we would sit in this in person meeting and say something like "it would be nice to get Steve's input on this, if he were here in this meeting" and now with zoom we can actually get steve in the meeting. We meet with people from around the world who might have relevant input.

If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.

How you know it was not anecdotical due to switching workspaces and it is not regressing to normal?

I work with a bunch of people who are super busy and they would say productive.

But little of their work drives the company forward.

6 people that are paddling a boat in different directions goes nowhere.

> You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.

If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.

You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.

You can look at how many features you implement.

You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.

And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.

There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.

Many assumptions in your statement: people are fully capable with self evaluation of their own productivity and companies aren’t bringing people back because of some cost associated with remote work. Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.

> Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.

Needs sources. Otherwise it's just speculation.

Need counter sources; otherwise it’s just speculation. Goes both ways.

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