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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

the correlation in my experience is if anything the other way around. The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas. This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for productivity and it's most popular among the "least amount of effort" crowd. It's also why almost any major tech company after covid is trying to scale remote work back again.

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You need to include the commuting time into the productivity calculation. If a person has to commute 1 hour for 200 days a year while working for 40 years, this would result in 8,000 hours of work-related unproductivity during a life, which is equivalent to 5 full years of work. This is the benchmark that you first have to surpass. In other words: such a person needs to be on average 12.5 percent more productive on site than at home to break even.

What companies pay for commuting?

>The best and most productive employees tend to be involved and in-person is still the best way to get things done and actually exchange ideas.

I'm having a hard time believing this. The people in my company who want to end remote work were the people that needed it for a social output. Nothing as shown that productivity suffered during the pandemic due to remote work.

>This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about,

Elon Musk is a 100% remote worker.

>t's also why almost any major tech company after covid is trying to scale remote work back again.

Hard disagree, most companies want people back in the office because they are run by middle managers who have spent their careers climbing the ladder by putting in face time and building relationships. Remote work is a huge detriment to that style of career advancement. They basically want everyone back in the office so they, the middle managers, can feel productive.

There is a reason they focus on abstract concepts like water cooler conversations rather than hard data. The data says there isn't a problem

I agree.

I feel like any discussion around remote work often involves comments that take personal anecdotal evidence and applies it to all remote work.

I do agree with losing social aspects. That being said, it's helped me realize that I should focus on being social OUTSIDE of work, rather than relying on work to be social.

That entirely depends on type of work. We do 1-2 days on site a week and it works well, we can get all of the management and coordination done then then just code away in peace without interruption. But that's programming, some jobs are less dependent on communication, some are more.

You do realize that doing something with the "least amount of effort" is the definition of productivity?

Reminds me of the old Bill Gates quote where he says "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

In person is the best way for professional meeting attendees to appear to be contributing while simultaneously wasting the time of the people who actually get things done.

> This is the one thing Musk is 100% right about, remote work is awful for productivity

Banning remote work famously turned Yahoo! around and eventually led to a sale of the company.

(Not mentioned here: the direction the company turned in, or the sale price)

Ah yes, these companies 100% want to reduce remote work due to productivity issues and not because they want to exert power over there employees. Because, as we all know, there's absolutely no way to measure productivity than by counting how many hours they spend at a physical location.

Employers should be required to pay for employees' entire commuting costs. That would make them think extra about how much they really need people on-site.

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