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Comment by radicaldreamer | Hacker News Reader

WFH makes it possible for some engineers (and managers) to not do any work and is often a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Without a strong way of gauging impact (a ton of hypergrowth startups and large companies are in this bucket), you can basically coast along doing minimal work.

On the other hand, there are a ton of engineers who are hyper-productive when working remotely but because companies don't know how to tell them apart from those who aren't productive at all, suffer because everyone gets dragged back to the office.

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WFH has nothing to do with people not working, people don't work in offices just as much. Tons of people love to come in at 9am, make coffee, stand around talking, go for a smoke at 10am, meetings, out to lunch for 3 hours at 11am, back to work for 2pm, meetings, smoke break at 2:30pm, make some tea, go back to the desk for 30 mins, go to the washroom and back to the desk for 10 and now home.

It's not exactly like adding "remove" to it and now suddenly everyone is a slacker. Sure perhaps there may be a higher percentage, but that is not proven (at least I've not seen any studies) so only a guess.

I suppose it depends on the nature of the work, but if your job entails making something, it's not an option to not do any work. You might find cases of surreptitious outsourcing, but someone is producing something.

The second point is definitely a problem, though. Software engineering managers really should come to the role by way of software engineering. It's really difficult to determine the impact of a particular engineer, otherwise. Remote vs. on-premises doesn't significantly change that, though.

WFH isn't the problem in that case, failing to gauge impact is. There is always a way to gauge someone's impact. Do you seriously walk around the office checking to make sure people are working hard to gauge impact?

I knew guys working from home who worked 10 hour weeks for years. Yeah, eventually they got laid off, but it was a mostly paid vacation for a long time. Not everyone is like that though.

There will always be people who figure out how to coast in or out of the office. Companies aren't that great at identifying hyper-productive employees in any sense. Great team members and management do that all on their own without regards to location strategy.

People who don't work don't work, it doesn't really matter where they are.

That seems false on the face of it. There are people (on HN, even!) who say they're more productive from an office, specifically without the distraction of children. These are people that "don't work" from home, so by your logic, they also wouldn't work from an office. Yet that doesn't seem to be true.

Thats if you take what a small number people say at face value and then apply that to everyone.

We can each only work with anecdotal evidence. In my working life I've not been able to observe a lot of people switching between in office and WFH. But those I have observed either got on with things in either location or carried on not really doing much, regardless of kids.

It would be cool to see some actual evidence... of anything really.

In my experience all the people who are most vocal for WFH are the ones who fall into the “out of sight out of mind” bucket.

in my experience that isn't the case at all. People who are most vocal tend to be parents or those that have a harsh commute and that isn't a clean overlap with slackers at all.

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