Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.