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Comment by iends | Hacker News Reader

You’re right.

I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day.

The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.

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What a great response.

And don‘t forget the 2 x 30 minute commute you converted to a solid hour of real work.

Yes, the abuse is real ;-)

It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids.

Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.

Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce.

I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.

Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.

I’ve been remote for 15 years with the past 3 in a C level position.

People fuck around in the office and they do at home too. Expectation management and selling yourself (aka know how to communicate) is all that matters. I can sleep in, tell people the truth, and life is good.

Offices are fucking expensive. It burdens IT and it’s a performance art at the end of the day anyway.

The boards job is to fire me. As long as I maintain my roadmap and provide evidence of progress nobody who matters has time to think about this shit.

Manage your SG&A expenses, risk, and be nice to legal. You’ll be fine.

Thats cool for you, but I'm speaking from my experience about my team's productivity falling off a cliff. Employees that do work when in the office, but wont even respond to email for days when working from home.

That may me a problem of the pepple tou hired, and how you lead them, instead of being a problem of where they work.

Perhaps they were slacking in the office as well, and only giving you the impression that they were busy. You might only be annoyed now because the mask is off.

If an employee cannot handle working from home then they can voluntarily return to office or be terminated for cause.

I’ve been leading a team remotely since March 2020 and have had no issues with my team that wasn’t cleared up after a quick conversation in our 1-1.

That's great for you. I have had good experiences long ago in other companies.

In my current company, team leads have little input on employee performance, and nobody has been fired or PIPed in my 100 person department in the last 10 years.

The primary thing that incentivized worker performance was social pressure and visibility from an in person environment.

You might say this is a management problem, and yes, I would agree. However, it still stands that this management problem is greatly exacerbated by hybrid and remote work.

Please understand you are not representative of everyone. I'm aware of several teams that were heavily remote far before COVID. They worked fine then, and they work fine now.

My very first sentence was saying I think it is different in different workplaces....

Thats my whole point.

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