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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure productivity maps that directly to revenue. People are wildly productive when they work remotely. What's harder is sharing context and tackling large problems with other people.

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Maybe the word productivity is creating some ambiguity here. Company (net) productivity is very different than individual or team productivity. Direction, Strategy and Agility play a much more significant role than raw speed or throughput.I believe with in person communication & interaction it is much easier to succeed in that.

Remote introduces barriers. It is theoretically possible that remote can move 100x faster & have better net productivity than in person, however that is far from the truth today.

Remote vs. in office has no difference in productivity from what I've seen. Most of in office communication is still over slack/chat. When collaboration is needed usually a tv screen is needed to screen share since two people sitting at one laptop is uncomfortable, and video chat screen share is better for that anyways. On top of that you don't have to wait for a meeting room that may be booked at the moment you want to collaborate.

Another big thing is the psychological effect of being a chair warmer. Sitting in an office environment, and being "seen" gives the impressing of working. Imagine seeing someone in their chair before and after you leave each day. It gives the impression that they are "working hard". With remote only there is no chair warming, you have to show results.

I think remote has the biggest issue with onboarding people that can't hit the ground running. I'd hate to be a new grad right now.

IME: This aspect of things has not proven to be a problem in practice; Slack and videoconferencing works well, FWIW. Managers are mainly complaining about forward planning not working as well as pre-pandemic, but they’re unwilling to actually change to fix that problem, which is how you get rigid hybrid plans and not flexibility.

There are better and worse ways to do it. But I found it uncomfortable to provide the "spin around and ask your co-worker" experience when helping to onboard people remotely. If someone's taking much longer than expected to get up to speed you want to find some way to make yourself more available without looking like you're watching their every move.

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