Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayarearefugee | Hacker News Reader

> Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.

In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.

Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).

View on HN

In my experience, a lot of remote empoyees not only do very little work but also are unresponsive. So when you need them, it's hours/days before you hear back. Even if people are unproductive in the office, they tend to at least be responsive.

If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.

I see no difference in someone being unresponsive by not being at their home desk hours (days??) at a time than not being at their in-office desk. If it's an actual persistent issue with the employee and they are not on a pip, then that's a management issue.

The amount of times that I have had to go to the numerous different kitchen areas only to find out the employee left the building to get coffee or run an errand is just as high if not higher than someone being 'away' on Teams when I need them. Only at home I just set an alert for when they're back online instead of attempting a wild goose chase.

You're basically arguing for WFH where working in-office is a PIP-lite so I'm not sure what you're arguing.

My experience is very different than yours I guess. My coworkers respond in a timely manner to my slack messages. It might not be immediately, but I mean, there's almost never a situation in which I need an immediate answer.

And in the cases where there is a delay I find that I still get the response quicker via slack than I would in person if I tried to find the person while they were at lunch in person and then had to go out of my way to try to find them again in the future, whereas the slack message allows for slightly async comms without me having to keep making requests which in my experience is more than adequate to get the job done.

Perhaps you need a lot of hand-holding day to day but everyone I work with does not.

the more responsive someone is, the less busy they are. unless they are doing work that is so easy that constant interruptions don't matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com