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Comment by mcbuilder | Hacker News Reader

Right now I'm working fully remote, but probably will end up spending 4-5 working weeks annual total in the office. I fly in maybe once every other month for like 3-4 days.

When I go to the office, my productivity really drops. I am reminded why I hate working full time in the office. Still, it's worth it for team dinners and other "team building" activities. I joke that the thing we get out of going to the office is to socialize.

I like the setup, though. When I do go, I'm basically doing a working vacation. We whiteboard, work on things I wouldn't normally do, have fun, and usually get something accomplished once I settle in.

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> When I go to the office, my productivity really drops.

Same for me. The first couple of times, I became really frustrated with spending a week in the office. It seemed to be a cycle of "Plug in laptop, read and respond to a couple of emails, unplug laptop, go to a meeting, bullshit for the first 10 minutes of the meeting, listen to other people talk for 40 minutes, bullshit for the last 10 minutes of the meeting, close laptop, stop by the cafeteria for coffee, bullshit over coffee for 10 minutes, go back to desk." Repeat 3x-4x a day for five days.

I "got over it" by finally accepting the fact that my week in the office is not going to be productive in my traditional sense. The cycle above is the work I am doing for that week.

> I joke that the thing we get out of going to the office is to socialize.

I understand the sentiment, but in-office socializing isn’t necessarily a bad thing or counterproductive. Sure, there are introverts who will insist on how much they despite in-office social norms and culture. There are also plenty of folks somewhere in between introvert and extrovert that appreciate the ability to spontaneously socialize in low pressure situations. That socializing can build rapport and overall happiness for folks. Remote work makes it challenging to do that without it feeling either very manufactured and typically self-selective for other extroverts; or a cheesy, clumsily organized “work event” that fails to attract much attention.

I am very definitely an introvert, and I have many times registered my distaste for the usual kinds of in-office socializing. Far too often, it's forced, it's interrupting your normal work, and it feels like it's required, not merely to do, but to do well, in order to remain accepted and have a chance at advancement.

What the GP describes sounds much better than all of that. It's not something that's just...a forced overlay on top of your daily work, making everything harder and more frustrating; it's a change from the routine, a time you're taking away from regular work to both socialize and work in a different way, and a chance to get fed on the company dime (which is generally a nice perk).

My company is still fully remote and one thing I’ve noticed is that individuals are more productive compared to the office, but teams are much less productive because everyone is just working on whatever they feel like instead of collaborating. It’s interesting to me that every individual seems to be more productive but our organization as a whole is clearly much less so.

This doesn't have anything to do with remote, but is instead due to lack of planning and leadership. Our remote team has good planning and tracking of activities, and our progress towards defined goals definitely improved when we went remote. All the tooling for doing sw dev work is essentially the same whether you're on site or remote.

Can't disagree with this, but I don't think "it's a management problem" precludes "it has something to do with remote work". Management at my company can't handle remote work. Some other companies seem to have similar problems. Maybe shareholders could fire leadership but that has major risks too. Safest bet is probably just to force everyone to rto.

And I hate these working vacations. One time I made an excuse and skipped out of it, and got a months work done in the week everyone was wasting time at the on-site. Nobody online to bug me, no meetings, just pure productivity.

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