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Comment by ghettoCoder | Hacker News Reader

Throughout my career it's been my experience that the type of people you describe are never the top performers, and seldom average performers. The ones craving social interactions often are just looking for distractions (like spending too long at the water cooler chatting) cause either they hate their job, hate the work, can't do the actual work or view work (exchange of labour/time for money) as a predominantly social activity. That type of person is usually a negative contributor overall.

No thanks. I get paid the same if it takes me 4 hours or 8 hours to complete my work. I'll take 4 hours and spend the rest of the day doing what I want.

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Disclaimer: Working for remote-only company.

“People that like social interaction are average performers” is such a wild take to me. I’ve worked with incredibly talented people in the past, where we’d go for lunch beers, travel together, come back to the office, finish up pretty complicated features. I don’t consider myself a “top performer”, but those people certainly were, and downplaying their talent and abilities just because they enjoy the company of other people is just… not nice.

This whole debate of “remote only” vs “fully back to office” is extremely subjective. Some people love one, some people enjoy the other. I’ll be happy as long as both of the options stay competitive enough where people get a choice.

They've studied this and in a technical setting, more social engineers get more done because people are willing to help and back their ideas and help them when they hit roadblocks.

I think you've conflated two things.

People can be productive or slackers. And they can be social or antisocial. You personally noticed the social slackers. But I doubt you noticed the antisocial ones, because they're not visibly doing nothing; they're distracting themselves in quieter ways.

I know plenty of people who are both productive and social. Indeed, given that both software and business are mostly team sports, some of the most productive people I know are very social.

That has been nearly the exact opposite of my experience.

As one advisor put it: researchers who prefer to keep their door closed often publish more papers over the course of a year, but researchers who keep their door open often publish more impactful research over the course of their lifetime.

That statement about open vs closed door was commonly used to justify open plan offices. Now it is being repurposed to justify in-office work in general. Interesting.

Interesting, I haven't heard the statement used in that way, seems like taking things a bit past their logical conclusion -- after all, the presence of a door implies that the researchers had actual offices.

(My prior job was the first time I've worked in an open plan office so one of my hard requirements in my prior job search was no open plan offices.)

Research impact is typically measured by peer driven citations. Peers also review papers and award grants. All of the above are easily gamed metrics by social engineers independently of the actual value of their work.

I've been working remotely for years with in-person visits on a monthly to quarterly basis. Brain-storming and planning in person definitely create value, but getting the work done is a different story. 10% inspiration (in person, maybe) and 90% perspiration (where they don't have to watch you sweat).

I'm curious how you would determine the "actual value of their work" without considering peer review or award grants? I'm not saying that shoddy work with good marketing deserves to be successful, but doing brilliant research that no one knows about seems like it's not particularly valuable either.

I've also worked with engineers who completely discounted the importance of the social aspect of their work. Frequently even their strongest work had minimal impact on the organization.

That's a pretty narrow viewpoint. I can tell you from personal experience that it is very difficult to graduate college almost straight into a (pandemic-induced) remote job in a new city while trying to make local connections and ramp up in my job during a global pandemic.

> I get paid the same if it takes me 4 hours or 8 hours to complete my work. I'll take 4 hours and spend the rest of the day doing what I want

This. working remotely you have the HUGE advantage of being able to work enough and spend the rest of your working time as you prefer, rather than waste it. Even if you deeply love your teammates, having more time for yourself is priceless, especially in a society where you're supposed to spend the most and the best of your life working.

Not everyone has your job function.

Not all job roles are the same and communication can be required for many. Building good rapport can help reduce tensions as well and being in person can help that.

In my experience, the top performers find more work if they finish what they're working on. But we all have our own anecdotes.

Edit: Find more work or help the rest of the team out.

"It only takes me 4 hours to complete my work" is a sign that you are a ticket drone and not an engineer with agency. This by definition means you are not a top performer. You also seem toxic to boot.

Most people aren't paid based on performance. The only difference between GPs behavior and the average company's mentality? The company making fat profits off of anyone willing to bust their hump for a pittance is nowhere near as condemned as an employee doing the equivalent.

Make performance scale better and the problem stops. There aren't enough jobs willing to do so.

That may all be true about compensation, but the poster was specifically making a claim about performance.

yup. Those are the kind that excels at "networking" but can't code a main function without an IDE if their lives depend on it

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