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Comment by Xenoamorphous | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone who’s been working remotely for the past 10+ years: could it be that the productivity has actually been affected? I know that (sadly) remote work is not for everyone and in some cases productivity nosedives.

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The beautfiul thing about these situations is that if the company demanding no WFH is doing it for productivity reasons, they could much more simply demand employees reach a minimal productivity threshold or be let go. No need to mandate what methods an employee uses to be productive, be it working from the home or office, if productivity is the goal, productivity should be the target.

When there is a mandate to return to the office, it really makes me wonder if the employer can even tell if their employees are productive at all, much less know that they are more productive in the office. If they could tell, they would simply use that measure directly.

That's the dilemma with modern work, it's almost impossible to measure. That feature you added this morning in four hours and 100 lines of code. Who is to know whether it could have been done in half the time and ten lines or whether most programmers would have taken twice as long.

Okay so in this case, companies are complaining that they’re noticing “lower productivity.” What are they noticing exactly?

One accusation is that they’ve noticed nothing and are demanding changes on entirely false pretenses.

Sort of, yeah. When GP says "it's almost impossible to measure", that does not mean that upper management does not in fact have some sort of metric that says "productivity" on the label. But what they're measuring is most likely going to have a tenuous relation to actual productivity.

A common problem is that they’ve noticed something real but are misattributing the cause. Sales are down - is it because the salespeople are slacking or because the mid-pandemic buying spike wasn’t the new normal? A big project is behind schedule - is that because people are working from home or because you have some senior managers playing politics?

In this case, the commercial real estate industry has been making a huge PR push trying to keep the value of their portfolios up so senior managers at most companies are regularly hearing that WFH causes problems - and anyone distrustful and/or looking for an excuse to shift blame is likely to seize on it.

Do you want stack ranking? Because this is how you get stack ranking. If you don't have a standard for productivity, then all you can do is say who is more "productive" than whom.

This assumes that RTO strictly only affects one's own productivity, but it's really the network effects that matter, so some Happy Hermit may be perfectly productive on their own objectives when exclusively working from home, but may be reducing other people's productivity through their absence.

If productivity is down just hold people accountable for their deliverables. Increase the number of milestones and have the managers actually manage. Do you know what people get away with at these companies? There are people that get away with not working for months (in companies like google, make that years).

edit: by increase the number of milestones i don't mean increase the amount of work, i mean increase the amount of times people need to demonstrate they actually did something.

What is a deliverable, though? You can deliver output but the question should be if the quality of the work is better wfh or wfo. The quality of work increases with face to face time with my colleagues. The quality decreased when I was all alone at home. So for some people with very straight forward deliverables it might be great, but for others that quality may have gone down.

I've actually been thinking about ways to align incentives of employees and the company they work for because from working in tech in SF I don't think the Google / Facebook incentive system works.

I have some ideas for how to measure output:

1. Code output: I know this one is controversial but at the end of the day code needs to be written. People wouldn't get penalized for missing this minimum output, it's just a signal that their work needs more detailed review. Rather than incentivize people to write more code I would say that some minimum amount of lines of code should be changed or a more detailed review of your work needs to be done.

2. Document output: Designs are obviously important to launching quality software so the work put into design documents should be taken into consideration but it should also result in actual features and products being launched.

3. Feature / Product launches: People actually shipping software and running and completing experiments should be tracked. This should be tracked and rewarded separately from the actual result of the experiment.

4. Feature / Product success: If feature and product launches are successful this should also be tied to employee performance but obviously the employee is not in complete control of this outcome. Sometimes things can be executed on well and just fail so this should be used for a bonus system of some sort.

There are obviously ways people can game a system and the system should be adjusted to account for them as they come up.

Either way, I think anything that encourages actual accountability is superior to the system people have blindly copied from Google and Facebook where you are rewarded for getting into management and building a tiny kingdom of people that do nothing.

This is a personal area of interest for me.

I think a lot of what you have described is flawed. It feels more like trying to systemize something that cannot be systemized.

One time I spent 6 months in a brutal migration of a critical system. Lines of code in production in those 6 months = 20 lines. By your measure, I did not accomplish much.

But where exactly did my time go? It went in getting stakeholders together, performing significant experiments to identify the problem, performing more experiments to find solutions, carefully roll out the experiments in various production datacenter - often over weekends. The output? Migration completed.

It was hard work, stressful and took a lot from me. But for a manager strictly follows your rubric, I was unproductive. And now, I get a poor performance rating. I would likely have to sink more time to produce tons of artifacts to prove that that rating was incorrect. Other engineers sees it. Learn to never take up hard problems ever. Just smash more lines of code to be safe.

You have single handedly shot the success of engineering by having an uninformed performance review criteria.

You missed the nuance of the code output just being one of many signals. But I have to say, if you are hired to produce software and you are doing things like "coordinating stakeholders" then there is already systemic rot in the company.

There is a systematic rot. And often management uses a performance review rubric only to protect themselves or to gut out engineers they don't jive with. It sets the wrong incentives by suggesting that any work outside of these items is worthless.

Which is why I disagree with a strict rubric.

> There are people that get away with not working for months (in companies like google, make that years).

That's a myth. Google's performance reviews, as flawed as they are, still require one to provide references to deliverables like reviewed commit history and reviewed documents written. Doing no work will result in poor performance ratings after a couple review cycles, since you will have no deliverables to your name. Those who produce nothing at all are routinely put on performance plans and then fired if things don't change. I've seen that happen.

That said, the Google performance review system, at least in my experience, can favor those who are strategic about choosing and promoting their work even if it is lower in quantity, and disadvantage those who do the a lot of work but aren't strategic about choosing and promotion it. That's almost by design, since in theory Google favors "impact" over lines of code.

> after a couple review cycles

So after 1.5 years?

A couple bad review cycles to firing is if you are significantly under-performing, not doing no work at all.

If you do absolutely no work, your manager will generally inquire about your state of motivation pretty quickly. You will be referred to internal or external resources to help you find your motivation, but if you refuse help or don't change course, you will be generally fired well before 2 review cycles. It's pretty rare for people to produce absolutely nothing though.

I think most companies do not know. Productivity of knowledge workers is pretty hard to measure at a level more granular than an entire department.

In my anecdotal experience the leadership of organizations is mostly flying by feel on this issue. And, by nature of their position, they skew heavily towards extroverts who value lots of work interactions. So their gut feels more face to face contact is important and that’s what they mandate.

It is not that hard to measure, at the end of the day code needs to be written. If the work you are doing is design heavy, then documents and charts need to be created. And then code needs to be written. Then finally, a product or feature needs to actually be launched.

Not everyone works in software. It can be hard to measure deliverables in a position that isn't deliverable-oriented. Maybe you're crucial to the department but your output isn't measurable directly.

> It is not that hard to measure, at the end of the day code needs to be written. If the work you are doing is design heavy, then documents and charts need to be created. And then code needs to be written. Then finally, a product or feature needs to actually be launched.

Very naive. If this was my manager, I would immediately know that my manager is unskilled.

Well I'm not a manager so it is naive but I've been working at these companies for close to a decade now and they produce nothing and there is rampant waste everywhere.

So the current management philosophy just sucks.

Also I'm very good at what I do (developing software), the common thing among the people that produce actual value to companies is that they are high output. Whether it's code or designs or whatever. And I'm talking about quality output obviously.

Was that feature the right feature though? How do you measure the org’s ability to ship another feature after that at an engineering level (ie, is it easy to maintain? Did they do good documentation or mentor others?) You very quickly end up with giant spreadsheets of tons of variables trying to model this without “customers gave us more money” which rarely works at the individual or even team level.

I think about stories like this:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Then that should be addressed with the specific individuals, not a global policy.

Hybrid seems interesting

Try telling one person they can work from home and someone else they can’t, it’s hard for some people to accept.

Set them productivity targets and allow for WFH if they are met.

It's what's being done with junior employees anyway.

I don't think it'd work like that. If anyone's underperforming should they be identified and handled through the process you'd normally follow, not by specifically retracting home-office priviledges as a punishment.

From what I've seen (anecdotally of course, a few friends) these "no more home office" orders don't tend to come as a response to any objectively measured drop in productivity, they come from CEOs and managers who benefit from being able to control things or crack the whip in-person.

Eh, if you treat it as a perk for good performance, like a salary increase, bonus, or additional PTO, then I don't see the problem? Either you earn it or you don't.

If it was the case of some individual contributors' productivity dropping because of WFH then yes, you can pinpoint that person, return him to the office and put a manager next to him to make him work

But recent years brought me to conclusion that many people have a need for in person communication, and your morale, productivity and even mental health going down little by little every day you interact with others only digitally. You can not fix this, if you bring back to office only selected few. You have to bring back the whole teams — so if a person goes to the office, everyone he works with and interacts with are also there

At that point doesn't it make more sense to fire the person?

When they don't make up 30% of your work force.

So you want to lower everyone else’s mental health and productivity?

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