Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.

I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.

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

I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.

View on HN

It depends a lot on how you define productivity. If it's heads down hours, sure.

But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:

- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.

- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.

- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.

When I've led teams, the first question I would ask if I noticed I needed to depend on seeing someone struggling would be which organizational failure made it get to that point, and how we could address it. Same thing if asking for a meeting is a complex thing, or if opportunities happen by chance before they're picked up in other ways.

I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.

So some guy doesn't feel secure enough to report to his team mates and manager that he is struggling.

Rando feels entitled to interrupt 2 Co workers whenever instead of working around their schedule.

Sounds like a few things need fixing here.

The "I can just roll over, interrupt them and get my chat done" is a pretty funny thing to bring up as a positive. I guess for non-developer roles that actually is a positive, but eh.

> - need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.

How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.

This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com