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Comment by kotlin2 | Hacker News Reader

WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. That is different than someone who desires to work from an office or remotely out of personal preference. For instance, I may prefer to WFH because it makes my life more convenient, but I can also accept that WFO produces better outcomes for the company.

Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes. Companies are collaborative human endeavors. Most WFH arguments I hear are related to personal fulfillment: more time with kids, less time commuting, more time for hobbies, etc. Those are all great things, but have little to do with productivity. The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun.

I don't want this to sound judgemental. There is no requirement that people organize their life around what's best for the company they work for. It's totally fine to enjoy working from home. But I don't see the argument that WFH is better than WFO for most companies, even if it's often better for the individual employees at those companies.

I think we'll get more conclusive data when WFH is and is not appropriate.

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> The closest work-related argument I've heard is that some people work better when they're free of distractions at the office. That takes us back to companies being collaborative human endeavors. One may feel they work better in isolation, but part of ones job is to interact with others, even if that's not fun.

Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm? My hearing the sales guys isn't 'collaboration', it's distraction. Hearing my coworkers at the much-lauded ping pong table having a great time while I'm trying to get work done isn't collaboration either. Collaboration is often code for 'meetings'. As evidenced by my outlook calendar, those haven't stopped. I find that people who make this argument are those who either spend the majority of their day 'collaborating' or those who have offices they can escape to when they need to think.

> One data point is the BLS released quarterly productivity numbers last month. Productivity is down 4.1% [0]. That's pretty massive.

Mass WFH started in 2020 - I don't think you can link a Q2 2022 productivity decrease to WFH, considering the previous quarter will have had even more WFH. In fact, it's easier to link it to the return to the office.

Edit: Hell, we can even see that non-farm business sector productivity INCREASED in both 2020 and 2021.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.t02.htm

As a big supporter of a WFH choice (and have myself for ~10 years):

> Mass WFH started in 2020 - I don't think you can link a Q2 2022 productivity decrease to WFH, considering the previous quarter will have had even more WFH. In fact, it's easier to link it to the return to the office.

I would honestly be impressed if a initial WFH productivity decline wasn't found. A lot of people were not prepared for WFH. They didn't have the home to accommodate it. I expect some decline for anyone who was not prepared.

I purposefully bought a home with 2 extra bedrooms just for offices because i've always enjoyed a dedicated office setup. So it's quite natural for me to WFH. However this is clearly a luxury and not what many people have. Closing the door to distractions is huge, to me at least.

You'd think that productivity declined in 2020, but based upon those charts it only did a little bit in Q1 and then bounced back hard in Q2 and Q3. I think people overcompensated, but the fact that it has stayed high for the rest of the lockdown tells me that it's not in fact the productivity killer that it's claimed to be.

It's funny, for me my biggest thing is that in WFO if i was overwhelmed on a problem or off feeling (tired/sick/etc) i would often just try and get through the day, horribly unproductive.

At home i can usually address the issue more quickly (quick nap, a walk, an extended break, etc - often fully detatching from work) and end up back to actually working far more quickly. For me these blockers would often just stall the whole day in office.

Tbh i wish office work was more similar in that regard. They expect everyone to work like robots, but in doing so they ignore the human element of overcoming all our quirks. We have no roads to get back to productivity in most offices, and in doing so my belief is that it ends up a net negative. People learn how to appear to work, while not working.

Though i mostly say this in the context of creative work (development).

> People learn how to appear to work, while not working.

This right here - when I didn't want to work I still didn't work, but I hid it in ways that ended up meaning it too me longer to get to a place I COULD be productive. I couldn't just disappear and recharge for a half hour.

So without hopefully coming off too flippant, noise canceling headphones can solve all of that, they did for me in an open office space at least.

It's how I survived as well, but that just means I'm cancelling out all the 'collaboration'.

They don't necessarily, many prefer music through speakers and not headphones, or silence

I can’t have music on while I work, especially not in headphones, or I just start listening to it, so this is not a universal solution.

I rarely wish pain on others, but for you, I wish migraines caused by pressure on the sides of your head, like some people have. Maybe a lesson will be learned.

To wish pain on someone for such an innocent comment on my end comes off rather bad for you. Just saying. Plus I don't wear over ear headphones, because I do get tension headaches, the newest Airpods however, are in ear and imo have the best active noise cancelling ever produced in a consumer product, so no need for ear cups.

I can take closed cans only for a short period of time.

In my company, we have observed that work from home has increased productivity in short term. But true collaborations have actually decreased. Often, in office, you would have coffee breaks/lunch with people from different departments, or talk with someone from other departments for may be 5 minutes. And we have noticed that these kind of low-cost interactions are greatly decreased during Work From Home as much because of discoverability as anything else. The effect this has on the company as a whole is that, we get less cross-pollination of ideas between different departments and therefore reduced potential for future growth.

Having said that, if you are in an environment where interactions not related to your personal responsibility is mostly negative interaction, then it is understandable that work from home is better. So, in short, I would like to say that, if a company has a healthy interaction between different departments, then work from office is better for the company without much loss of time to the employees. However, in other cases, employees might prefer work from home.

This of course can change from employee to employee. Some employees might prefer work from office because they have positive interactions with rest of office colleagues and other will prefer work from home.

*EDIT*: I should have led with this. In my office, we have 2 people per office room. So, we have enough privacy if needed.

> Often, in office, you would have coffee breaks/lunch with people from different departments

That wasn't my experience working in the office. Unless you were a manager or PM (someone whose job it was to facilitate cross-team communications), most people tended to just have lunch and coffee with either their own team or their personal friends. All of my experience has been at companies with over 1k employees though, I imagine at a smaller shop there's a bit more closeness.

> Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm? My hearing the sales guys isn't 'collaboration', it's distraction. Hearing my coworkers at the much-lauded ping pong table having a great time while I'm trying to get work done isn't collaboration either. Collaboration is often code for 'meetings'. As evidenced by my outlook calendar, those haven't stopped. I find that people who make this argument are those who either spend the majority of their day 'collaborating' or those who have offices they can escape to when they need to think.

That. The one medium-sized (several hundred employees) open-floor office I've worked in, I left in a matter of months in part because it was intensely stressful and difficult to actually do work. Loud, motion everywhere, people walking behind me constantly. Even the goddamn floor (so, also my monitor) shook when people walked on it, which was never not happening because there were so many people.

Go fucking figure, the managers had offices. And, HR got their own walled-off room just for them. Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because the experience for everyone else was basically hell and they knew it.

I could see good offices experiencing a decline in productivity with WFH, but I'm not sure that's the kind of office most people work in, and the bad kind would almost have to be more productive with WFH.

Have you worked in an open office or cubical farm?

This is a key point. I know I'm less productive working from home than I was in person, but my office was sane. I can easily believe that WFH is as or more productive than open plan abominations.

At my last work from office gig, I was sitting next to a sales support person who was on the phone all day long on topics that were irrelevant to my work. And the other software people would start shooting each other with f-ing nerf guns later on in the day. It was nearly impossible for me to concentrate.

My personal preferences be damned, I add way more value to the company from my quiet, comfortable home office.

I would be 100% fine with work from office if I got a private room with a door. I'm even OK with sharing it with 1-2 other people. But I have not been able to find anyone who will offer me that, only open office chaos -- bad for me, bad for the company.

> shooting each other with f-ing nerf guns

Well before COVID and the WFH swing, I left a job that I loved because of f-ing nerf guns. Because it just went crazy. People started with the 1 shot at a time guns. But then someone else bought one that would shoot 10 in a second. Someone figured out how to make a magazine that held 30. And so on and so forth. So when I got hit with 1 or 2 darts a day, sure. But when I was caught in a crossfire of 100s of darts, I just got sick of it.

A class of response I don't really see in responses here so far is that if the supposed benefits of WFO were supposed to be that high-bandwidth collaboration requires face-to-face interaction ... for a lot of companies that ship sailed a long time ago, prior to the pandemic.

Mid-sized and large companies _frequently_ have projects that involve people that would previously have been in different offices. In my last in-office job, it was already the norm that most meetings of importance were a Zoom call between at least two conference rooms anyways. We _already_ had to be able to form working relationships with people we didn't see in person regularly or almost ever, brainstorm and whiteboard over zoom, slack to ask someone a question, etc etc. There were long periods when I would go to my office and the immediate team I worked with would be entirely in other cities, and so all my collaboration was remote. In that context, insisting that people zoom from the office in their metro area isn't about actual productivity -- it's theater. It's putting on the performance of showing up, not because it helps you work better, but because being seen daily in passing by the SVP you report up to might be marginally better for your career.

With WFH (or more pointedly, work from a room I have sole control over), collaboration has one less hurdle. Before, I needed Zoom + a conference room at each participating office. Now I just need Zoom. Ad-hoc huddles no longer need to start with searching for empty rooms. Scheduled meetings don't start late because the prior meeting in that room ran slightly long, and conversations which go longer than scheduled are no longer interrupted by needing to vacate one room and find a different one.

This point gets ignored.

Even if everyone were to get pulled into their nearest local office tomorrow. And the majority probably do have a relatively nearby local office; I know relatively few people who moved remote during the pandemic. I would basically never be in a meeting where everyone (or even most people) were sitting together in one room.

And to add to your point, if half the people are more are going to be on Zoom anyway, I'd rather the people who could be in a conference room together just called in individually. A number of teams I work with have that as a rule.

One of the reasons I'm a big proponent of WFH (at least for tech careers) is precisely because WFO involves such a staggering amount of wasted time for everyone, but it's so baked into the business culture that few people seem to notice the full extent of it.

I think I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree with the implication that WFO means collaboration/interaction and WFH doesn't. WFO makes the cost of interaction so low that it tends to get abused. YMMV, but I've been WFH almost entirely for the past decade and one of the key benefits is that gets things closer to the sweet spot in the right amount of interaction, and the collaboration is of higher quality. *

WFH vs WFO has so many facets and tradeoffs, but for software companies at least, I'd be extremely skeptical that WFO produces better outcomes for the company on average.

* I don't fully know all the reasons for this, but I suspect it's because remote interaction encourages proficiency in a richer set of collaboration tools, and so we learn to naturally flow from tool to tool based on what is the best fit - chat for spitballing, email for thoughtful protracted debate, a Google doc for hammering out proposals and requirements, etc. In nearly every case there's automatically a searchable history created. In WFO, it's typical to lean way too heavily on face-to-face, which is extremely costly in the moment, it doesn't encourage putting much thought/preparation into the communication, and it also lacks any sort of history keeping (unless done manually), so information is lost or, worse, the face-to-face collaboration is then followed up with using the same tools to attempt to recreate what was discussed/decided (so redundant effort).

> I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.

Why should you want _arguments_ about a question for which there has been actual research? "Superior work outcomes" is a fuzzy thing to measure, but when units of work are clearly countable and it's agreed what constitutes "done", there are multiple studies that have found that WFH employees were more productive (i.e. did more in the same period of time), and since the pandemic there have been multiple findings that WFH employees were putting in more work hours (i.e. previously dead commute time became productive). Admittedly, the kinds of work that support this kind of clear measurement are generally not product design and development, but more like handling inbound customer calls, and for employees with some experience. The gold standard I'm thinking of here is Bloom et al from I think 2013 which did an actual random controlled trial. In that call center case, literally handling more calls per hour was attributed mostly to having a quieter environment, but workers did also work longer.

I think the main challenges aren't around "superior work outcomes" at the individual level, but stuff like training junior team members through interactions with their more senior colleagues. This is harder to measure, often isn't someone's "main" responsibility, and so individuals who appear to be succeeding at their own work can be less impactful on these secondary and indirect benefits.

All of which is to say, I think the personal fulfillment vs company benefit framing can be a misleading one. _which_ company benefits are most important? Does everyone in the company agree on that prioritization? Have you tried actually _measuring_ those, rather than just seeking "arguments"?

Yep. I also wanted to respond to this. My team had actual data that showed our productivity increased when we went fully remote. We also cut a full hour out of our work day (went from 8 to 7 hours per day).

Also:

> WFO produces better outcomes for the company.

What's backing that up?

I am curious how you measured your productivity. I do think that a weakness in the published data is that methodologically it's tough to measure productivity if work isn't done in clear, countable units, so only some kinds of work gets studied. And clearly teams struggle with picking the right metrics for themselves, carving tasks into the right sizes, etc.

Just Jira burndowns. We tracked ALL our work as tickets. Obviously story points aren't rock solid indicators, but we were basing it off a couple of years of data. For months before the pandemic there was a pretty solid line, then after months of working from home that line visibly raised. The org, who didn't look at our Jira data, also commented that stuff was coming out quicker. Of course there could have been other factors too, but that's what we saw.

A call center is not really a collaborative job at all, so it's unsurprising that there would be some gain from WFH. I don't think you can generalize what works in a call center to what works for knowledge workers, though.

WFO is shit and delivers measurably lower work. That is what I have seen. It is not useful to say these things because everyone works in a different environment. You are essentially saying "what you say works best for you doesn't work for me, so it must be what I want because I believe my way is better". It is attitudes like this that make offices the absolute hellscape that they are, with everyone constantly interrupting you because of what they want or need. There is no space for what the victim in that situation wants, any attitude that thinks that is in any way okay is fundamentally toxic.

> WFO is shit and delivers measurably lower work.

Where are your measurements? Most of the replies here are level-headed discussions, with statistics or points.

This reply is mainly about your disdain for WFO, nothing more.

anecdotally, i am willing to put in far more hours if i don't have to worry about falling asleep on the commute home.

Yeah, but again, not really a statistic, that's kind just how you feel.

Personally, I enjoy working in an office, as there is a very, very clear separation between my work and private lives. Yes, having a commute can suck most of the time, but hitting the store on my way home or going to the PO Box to get the mail makes it so that when I get home, I'm home, and done for the day.

As an employee I don't care one bit about "productivity" or "better outcomes for the company" or "superior work outcomes", I'm here to get paid.

Also: WFO is more expensive than WFH. WFO could be 10% better but it doesn't matter because it takes 20% more effort. Personally as someone with a chronic illness I'm not even going to entertain WFO unless it pays at least 100% better, and probably not even then.

Honestly as I operated a fully remote small business for a long long time, I think you're missing the real remote work lever.

Access to talent. Dramatically increased access to talent. Exponentially increased. You can get anybody across the whole world if you like, or at the very least anybody within a reasonable time difference.

This cannot possibly be overstated as an impact on your business. Talent is actually fairly evenly distributed across the world, but you only had access to a tiny slice of it before.

The issue here is that most management I've run into has a seriously hard time managing, recruiting, retaining, or honestly even identifying talent. Most of the time people just punt and say "Well they got hired at a FAANG, or somebody else promoted them, or they went to a school with a basketball team I've heard of, so how bad could they be" or something on those lines. So they're missing out on all these great people that were previously outside their narrow slice of who could reasonably drive in.

And managing a remote team is a big pain in the ass, no question about it.

So it's harder with a meaningful upside. Managers that can turn the corner will win, the rest are gonna get left behind. It's even more stark in tech, because organizations that can make that adjustment are going to poach a ton of talent from managers that can't get it together. WFH is very very very popular in tech. (I'm not really a WFH fan aside from family concerns, but family concerns are probably the biggest driver in my working decisions, so that's that. WFH is a big deal if you've got kids, and the best, most skilled workers you can get often are dealing with kids and a family. Folks with decent emotional intelligence, work experience, good energy, these people are textbook quality workers, but are usually married with a family.)

> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.

https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...

https://resources.owllabs.com/hubfs/SORW/SORW_2021/owl-labs_...

> Several studies over the past few months show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive.

I'm not going to comment on the entire Apollo Technical source, but I think some of their claims are misleading. For instance, they say this:

> A study by Standford of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increase productivity by 13%.

They link to the study, but it 404s. I believe this is the study [0] and it focuses on a single call-center. It's not a broad survey of 16,000 workers.

[0]: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

Okay, so what numbers would you believe? Collectively, there are hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap and value generated by remote first tech or very remote friendly companies of various sizes. The argument can't be made these orgs would be more productive if everyone was dragged into the office on feels alone.

https://builtin.com/remote-work/best-places-remote-work

I would believe any numbers that were objectively presented with sound methodology. Using a single call center study as evidence that worker productivity increases just doesn't make sense. Most work isn't anything like working in a call center.

Here is another misleading claim from that link:

> Working Remotely Can Increase Productivity up to 77%

But they then clarify that "77% of those who work remotely at least a few times per month show increased productivity." Productivity increasing by 77% is not the same as 77% of people experiencing any productivity gain. Also, they link to a source for this claim, but the link takes you to a blog spam page titled "43 Productivity Tools That Will Make Your Life Much Easier." There is no mention of the claim on this page.

I said this in a sibling comment, but according to our Jira metrics, my old team's productivity increased after both going fully remote and working one less hour each day. We didn't write anything about it, just giving you one personal anecdote where actual metrics were involved.

Your own cite is to a productivity report from a single quarter, when the WFH wave is in its 11th quarter now.

This feels like Wikipedia-lawyer disingenuous citation dueling. Nothing in this thread (or wider discussion writ large) is truly data driven in any scientific sense. Everyone is arguing their subjective view here, the only question is your self-awareness about it.

I've removed that link to the BLS data as I agree it is erroneous to try to correlate that data to any broad trends in WFH / WFO. However, the Apollo Technical link is filled with misleading summaries and questionable sources.

Just an anecdote, but my company saw about a 30% increase in completed stories and we've all been happier and less stressed. Now we're all on the same page when it comes to WFH & have been working together for a while so that is a big factor.

Trying to map BLS productivity data to WFH performance in the current economy and environment is absolutely crazy

I agree. I regret mentioning that as it doesn't really add anything to the main point I was making.

> WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company.

...

> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes.

And personally I haven't seen many good arguments that WFO produces superior work outcomes, and yet you seem to state it as fact.

I suspect WFH and WFO produce roughly equivalent work outcomes. That said, I hope we can both agree we're both to some extent guessing based on our own personal experiences (in my case I'm a VP at a dev shop and we've done more in the past year than we've done in the last five after landing a major deal; productivity is clearly not a problem for us).

But offering WFH as part of a flexible work policy:

1. Enables access to a larger labour market, meaning more high-quality candidates,

2. Creates a fairer labour market by removing barriers to entry (e.g. childcare),

3. Provides an additional benefit that helps attract and retain top talent, and

4. Ultimately improves the lives of individual workers since it provides more options to achieve work/life balance.

Honestly, in the end, I personally don't care if WFH actually maximizes "productivity" because I think chasing productivity has led to an extraordinarily toxic work culture.

>I think chasing productivity has led to an extraordinarily toxic work culture.

i will say that crunch from home is a lot easier to optimize and ultimately sustain than crunch-in-office.

Absolutely.

IME, far from being a barrier to productivity, WFH can make it harder to maintain a good work-life balance if you're not careful.

For example, it's a lot easier for my colleagues in other timezones to justify pulling me into a 6am meeting if they know I can just roll out of bed to take the call. And I personally know people who've put in a lot more overtime because it's just so easy to keep on coding when you don't have a commute to bookend your day.

Stir in this latent perception that people who work from home are lazy, and I could see WFH being more toxic for people who aren't careful or work for a company with a broken culture.

It's easier to be creative when you can bounce-off an idea with a coworker immediately, rather than wait for the Zoom meeting or wait for them to answer your Slack message.

We're actually building a virtual office to make having these quick chats easier (gloo.chat). If you would want to try it out, or even just provide some feedback, that would be amazing given we just got started. Totally shameless plug.

For me, it's easiest to be creative when I can enter a flow state, and that's best achieved by muting Slack notifications and blocking out all external stimulus. Coworkers bouncing ideas off me "immediately" whenever they see fit is a recipe for decreasing my productivity.

Yep we encourage people to turn off our app (Gloo) a few days a week similarly to having "no meeting days". In the end, people can always decide how often they want to be reachable for.

> Personally, I haven't seen many good arguments that WFH produces superior work outcomes. Companies are collaborative human endeavors. Most WFH arguments I hear are related to personal fulfillment: more time with kids, less time commuting, more time for hobbies, etc. Those are all great things, but have little to do with productivity.

I don't see any rigorous argument that WFO is more productive in your analysis either though, just that you suspect it's the case. It seems a bit of a stretch to me to assume that WFO is more likely to be productive merely because it's claimed on that side of the debate; if anything, making that claim without hard data makes it more dubious to me compared to the side not making any claims that require data without providing it. We don't even know for sure if either WFO or WFH even is more productive in a significant way, let alone which one it is!

Tangentially, there's also an implicit sentiment here that the needs of the company trump the needs of the employee when they're at odds, and I don't think that's universally the case. The reason minimum wage and workplace safety regulations are a good idea is orthogonal to productivity; they're good ideas because they are important enough for workers that we're willing to deal with the consequences they might have on productivity. Even if I accepted the premise that WFH is a net negative for companies (which I don't accept as a premise, although I don't have my mind 100% made up one way or another), I still think the question of whether it's important enough for workers despite this is unsettled.

First off, let's get this quote out of the way:

This just feels like motivated reasoning to me. Here's how I read it "I've NEVER SEEN an argument for why WFH is better... Well, some people did say they're more focused and productive when working from home, but they're probably just doing a poor job of communication so that outweighs any of their perceived productivity gains." How can we falsify this rebuttal? I certainly have enough data to show that I've had much greater and more consistent engagement with my work since transitioning to work from home, and I have plenty of 1:1s and meetings with the rest of my team to stay connected and work through problems. Our team has shipped successful products entirely working from home. But that argument runs up against a brick wall if you're predisposed to assume that whatever job I'm doing at home, I'd be more effective in the office.

Personally I haven't seen much evidence for the proposition that WFO produces better outcomes. Most of the arguments seem to be from first principles, like the communication argument you're making or the argument that companies would have already gone WFH if it were better for the bottom line.

The problem with the work outcomes conversation is that our industry has 1) no reliable way of measuring work output and thus 2) no reliable way of measuring productivity. This is why despite decades of research we have no good way to estimate when projects will be done, for example. Each organization is unique. Each project is unique. Comparing across them is questionable. That means conversations that are ostensibly about what makes a business productive are really just a dressed up proxy for our own values.

If you want WFH to value-add to your position then it’s on you to make it happen.

Where I am, the WFHers have ruined a lot of morale and contributed to around half the team leaving.

And yet, I bet those WFHers are far happier now than they were before.

How do WFHers ruin morale?

And was it really them, or managements treatment of the issues?

We've got a "flexible" tues-thurs in the office, but pretty much on any given day there's maybe 50% in the office, max, unless there's a particular event or reason.

And it's fine. Every meeting is 50% of people on zoom, but who those people are varies day to to, there's no lines drawn... and lots of the managers are just as likely to be wfh as the rest of us so...?

We did invest in some fairly decent zoom set-ups in our meeting rooms, and even some stuff in my open ad hoc areas, and we've all got good enough equipment and headphones, we do very very little of the "can you hear me" song and dance.

We work. We laugh and joke around. We do it on zoom and we do it in the office.

So..I'm seeing it work, not perfectly but not noticeably worse either.. what broke in your environment?

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