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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).

The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.

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It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).

My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.

Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.

It's all guesswork until we start measuring the impact of interruptions in open plan offices vs. homes (which is going to vary with families).

Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.

I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.

"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.

I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.

I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.

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