People on HN love to pretend that no one was slacking off while ostensibly "working from home"
But yes, people can slack off anywhere. 'Butts in seats' is one of the laziest metrics for management to use for 'working'.
Plenty of jobs are intermittently high-demand and high-stakes while leaving a ton of free time throughout the day.
And to your point about high-demand/high-stakes, at the same job as the MUD guy there was an old guy. He would leave before lunch go play tennis, nap under his desk in his cube, etc... I asked one of the other young people one day (I was still in college), what the old guy did. Apparently he was the only one who knew how to code a certain system, and he was only there to do that job when the system needed a change or had a problem.
I fail to see the problem there...
Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.
Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.
But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.
The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.
Because children are not adults. They don't have the attention span and concentration skills to focus on something for 8 hours a day. Evolutionarily so - the job of children is to play, discover and learn. The job of adults is to concentrate and run the show.
Even the existing schooling system that crams kids into classrooms and gets them to look at a board to learn things is contrary to human evolution actually. Its the product of the early education system that developed from late medieval scholastic religious education practices.
My grandson was like this. He was in a "virtual school" pod with three other children and is reading far ahead of his grade level and one of the reasons is that he didn't have to spend a ton of time in the child-management boot camp that a lot of elementary schools tend to be.
But this was a complete restart of something two of my in-office colleagues fucked up over the space of 2 weeks.
The problem in orgs is shit people, not working from home.
When I'm at home I can at least be productive. I can make lunch, start a load of laundry, something. At work I have to sit there and pretend to work because exec loves watching people work, which is ultimately not as refreshing and doesn't allow me to get back in the zone as quickly.
Suddenly all these ideas from behavioral economics about implicit bias and contextual framing don’t apply, and we are now all Austrians studying rational and disciplined labor units.
We all know some people slack off, they find ways to do it in office too.