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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job".

My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it.

This is obvious to many people I talk to who have seen it the other way and are seeing it now from the elevated perspective.

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it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face

Less productive, compared to what though? In most offices I've seen cubicles and open-plan spaces reign supreme, along with flex-desk policies. Which means that even when all team members are in the office, they are not working face to face. So while you may be correct that teams could be more productive if they're all in the same space, the typical office is not optimized to achieve that.

Also, teams never need to be face-to-face for the entirety of the work: in my experience, only design and planning benefits from face-to-face coordination; for deep productive work the benefits of quick verbal checks is negated by the loss of focus from quick verbal checks from others.

I find myself knowing so much less about the day-to-day personal lives of my co-workers.

Perhaps this is what people are referring to as team productivity?

Do some people work better as a team with that personal bond? That would result in a measured change but it would be foolish to expand it to all teams, which makes it all the more plausible why some companies are pushing hard for return to office.

I've been working on an app, with a small team, of [mostly] non-tech folks.

Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with occasional Zoom calls.

I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong.

A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours.

I came out of that meeting with a very complete kanban list. I think it may have been our most productive meeting, ever.

I need to work on my own, at home, but I also need to have real (non-Zoom) facetime with my team.

But that's just me.

> A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours.

What is your team doing differently with video calls that you don't end them with a complete list of items for everyone?

Oh, we get lists, but they are much shorter.

For example, I want to show them where a button needs to go, I simply hold up the phone, and point. With Zoom, we have a wrestling match over screen share.

I'm still not understanding, is the issue that people don't want to give up their own screenshare, or call attendees have technical issues?

I understand that video calls aren't as "natural" or intuitive as in-person meets but having been at multiple companies that ship with remote teams, I remain unconvinced that video calls can't be as productive as in-person meetings.

Video calls require more intention, purpose, and focus. And everyone needs to learn how to use Google Meet or Zoom or whatever service. This is not an insurmountable problem, and the problem disappears pretty quickly once everyone buys in.

I'm sorry. It appears that my anecdote was perceived as an attack on remote work (it wasn't. I'm a big believer in it).

In any case, I don't think it will be productive for me to continue, here.

Carry on.

I've had the same experience at a fully remote company, working for short periods face to face once or twice a year clarified a ton of stuff and made me far more productive than normal during and after the event. I have never felt more productive working remotely, except when I want to concentrate on a task that is already laid out and have to deal with distractions of an open environment.

Why were you not able to accomplish that with a Zoom video call or voice call?

Why was that not possible with a common Slack chat channel? Or a Trello or something?

A lot of times these problems boil down to people not being willing or able to dedicate the time every day to work on a project or communicate properly online. Often a combination for underfunded projects. And lack of written communication ability can contribute strongly.

I don't think that we should really blame remote for all of that.

I wasn't blaming remote for anything.

It was an observation of what happened.

Prescribing a great deal of process and overhead is always a "solution," but, in my experience, it doesn't always have the best results. I used to work for a Japanese corporation, where Overhead was a religion. They got stuff done -often, impressively so, but it could be very painful, and not always as efficiently as we would like.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wasn’t for emphasis. It was an effect. I was actually considering using the “code listing” form for it. I think I’ve done that, before.

Otherwise, I always use italics.

Feel free to go through my postings (there’s a fair number of them), and point out all the places I violate the Ts and Cs.

YMMV - it's not obvious to me. Almost no team I have worked in has been f2f due to offshoring and geographical distribution of functions in big companies. Only small companies can really do co-location.

> teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it.

I can imagine this argument being true if and only if the team is all based in the same office, which isn't necessarily common. My team is spread across two countries and four cities, my being in the office means I'd be co-located with about 1/3rd of it currently. I think though if you are on a team that requires a lot of collaboration with people outside of where your office is (either a closely related team or people on your team) then you're better off WFH than in an open office, because calls are so much more painful in the office, especially if multiple people on the same call in the same office. The amount of managing muting your mic to prevent office noise and echoing and etc is such a drain compared from WFH

"Vibes for me, data for thee".

People lean heavily on anecdotes when it comes to worker productivity. But actual data is much more nuanced on the matter.

People seem to have completely forgotten how worker productivity actually went up a noticeable amount during a time when most people were working at home – and under some very unusual circumstances mind you – and actually began declining after restrictions ended and companies started asking people to return on a hybrid or full-time basis.

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