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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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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