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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Some or many people are just as productive working from home, but also many are not and are more productive in an office environment.

There need to be better more reliable ways of measuring this and affording those who are able to be productive while remote the option. Those who aren’t as productive WFH don’t get the choice.

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Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less

If one company were to hire all the slackers and the other all the busy beavers, one will be more likely to succeed vs the other.

Unless being a slacker becomes a protected class companies will hire the productive people, given a choice.

How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people".

The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.

A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?

What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.

So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?

ask yourself that question and answer it.

just what in the hell are you thinking?

> productive [...] ways of measuring

I always point out that most "productivity" numbers assume the costs of commuting hours/fuel are $0, because it measures from the perspective of employer costs, and it assumes the employer has used their bargaining-position to force all those variable-costs entirely onto the employees.

So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity boost" sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) probably not sustainable in the long-term anyway.

Tying my ability to work remotely, and thus plan and live my life accordingly, to some kind of arbitrary performance mechanism installed by Initech's latest up-and-coming executive star, will result in me immediately leaving. I have the skill to back that statement, but I won't employ it just so that some patronizing manager can get a kick out of it.

A level of productivity is part of the package that the employer buys from the employee. Some people might be less productive WFH, but if the WFH perk is important enough to them that it is a deal-breaker, then… that’s what’s for sale, the company can take it or leave it.

If you already have a set of employees, and you demand they all come in, you are selecting against people who know they can sustain their lifestyle by moving to another company.

Only problem with low enough productivity enough to be bumped down to becoming totally unemployable don’t get the choice. These also are the people who are most likely to follow an in-office mandate. It seems like a bad filter to apply.

I'm more productive in the office, but I prefer working from home.

Productivity increased exponentially for many years in line with technological advances. We were supposed to have flying cars and personal robots by now. The least they can do is allow us to reap our meager earnings from our own hovels.

> also many are not and are more productive in an office environment

I see this assertion every time the WFH/RTO topic is brought up, but there's never any data to back it up. Mind changing that?

When I work from home, I watch 8 hours of Twitch and get 0 work done. When I work from the office, I watch 0 hours of Twitch and get 8 hours of work done. I simply don't have the self-control to effectively work from home. That's all the data I need.

Ultimately only people's immediate managers have insight into this either from managing them or from their co-workers. People eventually will let you know who isn't pulling their weight (obviously people will forgive others if they know they have a temporary issue in their life --but not if its unwarranted).

Simply saying "people will know" is a deflection that doesn't really help this point.

If you (royal you - anybody who wants to make this claim) really want to claim that many people are measurably more productive at the office, we'll need studies to counter those done which show WFH is more productive than working from the office.

Doing studies on this is difficult for many reasons. However, I bet there's a lot of people who noticed a drop in productivity from certain colleagues after the switch to WFH. I personally noticed that the productivity of colleagues with young children dropped significantly, for example.

I really don't think it's a controversial statement that some people work better from home and some people work worse from home. In fact, I'd be extremely surprised if the opposite was true (everyone works better from home, or everyone works better in the office), I'd almost say that's impossible.

I think you misunderstand me.

I think some people _are_ more productive WFH. But also there are lots of people who become quite unproductive WFH. Direct managers can often tell.

I don't know of a study that says one way or another, but from experience those two kinds of people exist (among other kids of people).

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