Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds

This is it. Add to the fact that poor managers don't really understand or know what their staff are doing, it gives them anxiety. If the same poor manager is in an office with them and can see them at their desk then it alleviates that somewhat.

Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.

I think this is largely it - the whole maker vs. manager thing... when your job relies on focus, being in a situation where you can control distractions is a benefit. But when your job relies on getting others' attention it can clearly be a negative, esp. if the culture is not thoroughly supportive.

It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.

It's the point where you're no longer an individual contributor. Running a team and keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely.

Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.

I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.

Seems pretty obvious to me that this has always been the divide

I have a lot of interpersonal work, with people all around the world. Going into the office just to talk on these people on Teams doesn't give a productivity boost. Being able to do this or not is a skill, just like coding is a skill. I try not to bog down my team if I'm deficient in some skill, instead, I work to improve it.

I agree with this

I definitely agree here. For most of my career I was fortunate enough to not have a "real" commute. at most a 20 min walk to the office. The worse commute is when it was raining or snowing.

The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.

Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.

I wonder if others are in the same situation.

I absolutely let my employer pay for my commute. Indirectly of course, but my income requirements are dependent on how much hours I have to put into work, which includes my overall time investment. Same with all other costs I have because of work.

That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.

If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.

During my last job change I gave concrete numbers to recruiters on what getting me into an office would cost.

In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.

Exactly. For me, there's nothing better than 15 minute walking commute.

IMO, an hour spent commuting is an hour stolen from one’s children.

Not just time cost, but also monetary cost. At least in tech, most jobs exist in a small set of metro areas where housing prices are incredibly high. Pushing for more remote work enables more flexibility in where people live / can ease some of the housing pressure on these congested metros.

The solution to that problem is to count the travel time and any required breaks as part of work hours while also reimbursing all travel expenses. That would require employers to pay the full cost of unnecessary in-person work on both ends and would strongly disincentivize them from doing it.

Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?

BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.

I've generally had a 30-40min commute most of my career, but also generally had a flexible enough start time that exact to the minute arrival at my desk was not performance impacting.

Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.

For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.

Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.

For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".

It’s really more than that. I live in the city, my office is 7 minutes away most mornings.

The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.

I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.

End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.

I just commute during work hours. My boss is fine with this and I'm in the office around 6.5 hours per day.

Not only the commute, but also lunch breaks. In US and Canada, lunch breaks are short, but back in Brazil I had a 1:30h lunch break, and then at another job, 1:12. But I'm at the office, can't go to bed, I'm at the company's computer so can't do anything I want, also it's in the office, so if watching some TV show or anime that has more graphic content, that might also be a no.

So basically, waste of time.

I get calls for jobs that would increase my TC by 100k, jobs I’m confident I could land, and I won’t interview for any of them. That’s how much WFH means to me.

Yes. Like a thousand times yes. I learned this lesson as a manager very slowly because I hate being micromanaged.

It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.

I dont think this is about workers preference. People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation, but when directly asked nobody will tell you they like micromanaged (seen this). Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.

Interns, new employees...

It’s not a preference to be micromanaged.

It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.

You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.

Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.

Seems if you have staff that needs constant oversight and micromanagement, it's a waste of your own time. Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

I have worked with people who needed explicit instructions for every step to perform, and if they complete what is assigned to them they will quietly sit and pass the time until they are explicitly told to do something.

This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".

If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.

However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.

Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.

If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.

Not across the board, no.

Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.

Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)

I can't imagine a C-suite determining literally anything about my team beyond allowing it to exist in the budget.

I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.

'place of work' is usually (here in Czechia) defined in a labor contract. So that cannot change because 'team decided'. I have contract with my employer, not with my team.

>you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation

Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.

It doesn't make syncing harder. I've worked for high-performing global teams for DECADES, so this debate is amusing to me. It shows me which companies absolutely cannot scale past a certain point, and which perpetuate terrible communication and management practices papered over with in person smokescreens.

Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.

(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)

I am 100% in the remote work camp, but I agree with you. Every company has the right to make the choice that works for them... whether empirically driven or not, it is their prerogative to choose. But they do then need to hire the people for whom that choice works. And as people looking for work, we need to accept that some companies are non-viable for us because of the choices they make.

The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.

> If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement?

As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.

The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.

Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.

In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.

There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).

In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.

Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?

I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.

But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.

I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent

IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.

Pretty much agree, but ultimately the onus on hiring the right people is on the hiring manager. The pattern here is management blaming their own incompetence on anything that doesn't lead back to themselves, such as WFH. Then you have higher level leadership eating this up because of their own laziness and incompetence. Incompetence all the way up.

It's absolutely true that the real problem in the US is our public transit (and by extension basically all post-WW2 buildings and infrastructure) situation, but if I'm just a guy running a software company, there doesn't seem to be much I can do about that. Hence all the hand-wringing about remote work.

I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.

The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.

Yep very much this. Why on earth would you choose to live somewhere that is a 3 hour commute. DOn't do that to yourself. Move. If your commute is that bad, either you're choosing a stupid place to live, or your town planning is terrible. That's the problem, not working in the office. Everyone should be able to do a few days hybrid comfortably. If you can't, you should have a job in a city closer to you.

But they exist, have jobs, and are producing things of value for other companies. You still have to deal with them.

It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.

In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently.

CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.

The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.

Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives.

For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.

Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.

In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.

If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.

Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.

> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B

Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.

Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.

If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.

Well the laundry is indirectly part of

C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.

B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too.

Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.

I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.

Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.

A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.

B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.

C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.

Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.

There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.

Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.

> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B

Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.

There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".

> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)

The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.

>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.

It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower.

Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.

Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.

that’s just fine and good for you, but please don’t impose your preferences on the rest of us.

> That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line.

Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.

You forget that the same 'investors' that own the companies, also own the buildings and all the companies that finance, build and service the buildings as well as the whole 'economy' fueled by employees commuting and lunching etc.

> evidence office space is a boondoggle

It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.

> In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat

For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.

With the wrong demanding coworker or (especially) midwit middle manager who wants to talk about sportsball or politics, your entire company loses, not sure what your (rather sexist) point is tbh.

Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.

Your coworkers are not your friends and your company is not your family, and if your job is keeping you from having friends and family outside of work then you need to find a new job or place to live.

We have a system where we clock in and out. This reduces the situation to "be clocked in when you work and clocked out otherwise" which is easy to handle psychologically.

So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.

And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.

Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.

This mirrors the issue I had with work from home to a tee. During the pandemic, as soon as it was safe, I went into a ghost town of an office right up until they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home. I was eventually able to find that coffee shops filled a similar function for me, and now spend a majority of my productive workday at one.

(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)

To me this is almost like internal vs external locus of control stuff.

I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.

In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).

It's a bit more complicated than that I think.

In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.

They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.

Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).

I have worked with/for dozens of startups. There are thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of fully remote startups.

> If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks.

I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).

I'm completely opposite, so much energy wasted dealing with people. Just give me the requirements, only contact me for technical reasons please. I'm not a social animal, I work to collect my salary to pay bills, full stop. Less contacts means better work quality because I'm not wasting my energy somewhere else.

Which ones?

Depends from case to case. It might be a complex project, but the lead/architect already has the right answers and there will be smooth sailing. On the contrary it might be a project with constantly changing requirements, new portions of tech stack for all the team, tight deadlines, some tool chosen for a task does not support something, bugs, estimations did not meet reality. In that case (a challenging project) I would prefer the team in the office.

Also if you are a begginer, I would recommend to search for work in office if it works for you.

I dislike commuting more than half an hour, however I would like the team to be together if it's something challenging.

I know it is hard to commute long time, especially if you have other responsibilities, but that does't change my opinion on what is the best for the team.

If you own a big office building and companies don't need as much office space then you can't charge as much for rent, and the property loses value. Similar to how online shopping has led to a bunch of malls closing down

This is something that gets trotted out every time this topic comes up. It's got little to do with the actual conversation, and it only relevant to some companies.

Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.

If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.

The commercial real estate market is a lot bigger than $5B.

This.

The investor class is furious about remote work, because it affects their real estate pyramid scheme.

> When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler.

I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.

If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.

Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.

> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.

I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.

Then it seems you should leave and find another job if remote work is one of your priorities.

That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.

Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.

And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place? How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group? How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it? And god forbid somewhere have a job that isn’t software engineering…

Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.

What other things are you doing for 40 straight hours?

Seriously. As an engineer and engineering leader, I cannot maintain focus to code, sit in meetings, and a variety of other tasks for more than 2-3 hours without a break. It is good to get up, move around, catch up on the news, etc. Taking appropriate breaks and conducting self care gives my mind an opportunity to decompress, allowing me to come back to work more focused and productive. Very long sessions (5+ hours) without a break tend to run into a wall - I may still be doing work, but the quality drops precipitously. Sometimes, I can raise my productivity by distracting myself with home chores (e.g. laundry). Sometimes, I find a quick dip into the news or a catchup on our friend group's discord server productive. This may not be the same for all of us, but studies have repeatedly shown breaks improve productivity for most individuals. Being outside the office, I find it much more convenient to take a productive break without having other coworkers distracting me. Looking over studies and suggestions, it seems interesting to me that tasks like meditation, power naps, small chores, snacks, listening to music, and interacting with pets are much more easily conducted in the comfort of our homes.

https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/taking-breaks/ https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-take-better-breaks-at-work-ac...

Not only creative work, but manual work too. It's been over 100 years that Frederick Taylor showed regular breaks reduces fatigue and increases productivity. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

A semi-relevant anecdote: over the Christmas break (which was > 2 weeks for me), I was pouring 12-14 hours a day into my personal hobby project and didn’t feel tired or bored at all. I literally couldn’t stop working on it.

Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.

Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches.

The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.

> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?

If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.

The only thing I've ever had issues with doing it remote is writing compliance policy, operational guidelines, and organizational standards. My boss wanted them re-written once every year into a different format and it destroyed my soul. What we had worked fine and didn't need to be re-written in my opinion.

I think any given job is neither interesting nor boring- it the attitude that makes it so. For example I am the person who don't like doing the stuff if I know how to do it - it boring for me, while my colleague is happily dingo stuff that is clean while skipping obscured tasks. Following this you cannot give someone interesting task, you can only guide person to choose the right perspective

> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?

I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.

In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.

I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.

And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?

There is a lot of boring and low "meaning" work that needs to be done. To give a trite example, washing your dishes and keeping your house clean. Or brushing your teeth and flossing. Or making revenue dashboards tracking income and making sure that data reporting is accurate.

I am not sure, but I have always pursued this kind of work by default and aggressively. Of course there will always be ups and downs, but when it stops feeling interesting, meaningful, and challenging for a prolonged period of time, I generally move on (or switch teams/projects!). But while it remains overall interesting and meaningful, I stay and hold on to it for as long as I possibly can. This has meant that I haven't job-hopped very much to climb the salary ladder, but have been very engaged and interested in every position. It's been a worthwhile tradeoff.

I would also raise the point that actually having relationships with your colleagues and team can make work a lot more meaningful and make you more motivated. It is impossible to do that if you don't meet them. The idea that corporate work can be motivating at all when you exist in a vaccuum in your bedroom is idiotic. Almost no work is ineherently interesting.

Bah, thing of the past! Now it's mostly organic breakthrough moments of creativity. At a few places it's serendipitious collaboration, of course.

I’ve worked in an office for over 25 years. I’ve never chatted with anyone at the water cooler (those, these days it is a water dispenser machine that can dispense cold or hot still water or sparkling water). I assume this water cooler chat thing must be from farther back in time.

I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was obvious to say "Good morning, what's up" and have him tell me.

This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.

This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.

90-minute lunches, extended ping-pong table visits, "attending" meetings one doesn't contribute to are various ways to waste time at the office, but no one is eager to banish those. It appears it's only a problem when people slack at home; on the flip-side, no one is offering bonuses for those when they work until 7 or 8 pm because WFH can blur division between work and not-work life.

Yes, but even 20+ years ago when I worked for a large Silicon Valley company: most of the people I interacted with were in different buildings so it was easier to email them than to go find them. Then we acquired a team in another country. When I went remote in 1999 one of the reasons I could justify that was that when I drove to the office every day I usually spent each day communicating by email and phone with colleagues.

I feel like you are wearing some very strong rose colored glasses; I personally think it’s naive to believe that remote workers are always highly engaged. People optimize their work productivity around different personal goals.. and I have worked with many who seem to try to do as little work as possible to not get fired. Which often involves a lot of loathing and procrastination.

It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.

> Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom.

For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.

Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.

Or it's just boring work. I'm employed as software engineer with no reports as a team of 4 engineers. The project has entered maintenance mode and we just investigate bugs, chase teams we're dependent on, confirm a change works on 4 different versions.. my productivity has tanked.

I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.

This is a pretty dim view, especially here on HN.

People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ― Mark Twain

This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.

I enjoy software development. I would develop with or without a paycheck. The pay is a bid to make me give a shit about what my employer wants me to develop, a bid they need to keep higher than every other person who has money but no ability to make the things they want.

What would this involve? And can't they buy equity with their salaries if they wanted to?

Duh, nobody is looking at it. Everybody is either slacking off on their own screen or working.

I work for a small tech company in the US (~25 employees) and a few of them are in Europe. My boss didn't seem to have any issue hiring them and he wears a lot of hats, and we didn't hire them due to cost but to their very specific expertise.

No, sorry. These are all defeated by hiring contractors.

The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.

The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.

In a vacuum, both of those first two considerations are easily resolved by hiring even more remote workers from an area with low pay (and low cost of living), and who share similar timezones and primary language.

But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.

(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)

Totally understand offshoring went out of fashion prior to remote work and Covid. I'd be curious to know how management is evaluating that post Covid. I have to imagine many of them didn't learn their lesson, and I also imagine the quality of software engineers outside the US has risen in the meantime.

That's a right incentive for workers, but what is needed here for workers is an incentive for companies to expand remote work.

Agreed. It's just so clear to me that role(s) flex between those set of tasks as need be ... and that should be clear to both manager and managed ...

The manager shouldn't be a control freak about being in the office 5 days a week ... and the managed shouldn't be a whiny baby when asked to come do some human stuff ... somewhere in the middle is the promised land and it should't be that hard to find.

Having said that ... I had an experience with a colleague recently that reminded that not much of this is based on reason.

To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.

I thought this would be obvious, but making up some assumptions about industry-level adoption of remote work based on the composition of employees and then seeing if those industries broke from their pre-pandemic trends requires companies to mechanically adopt WFH policies regardless of whether they are good or not (somewhat reasonable during the peak of covid, but not really for much long after, and also requires the timing of those shocks to line up) and then also needs that shock to be so big that you can see it at the industry level, separate from the general covid shock, and then also risks finding incorrect impacts because covid unsurprisingly had industry-specific effects.

Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.

This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.

In fairness, there does seem to be a lot of concern amongst the management class around keeping their jobs if they don't get back into the office.

Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.