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bsoles

Like when my company's bosses decided:

- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.

- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

And always supported with "data".

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COVID wfh was a weird time. The company I worked for was remote before COVID. Oddly, COVID was a boost to basically every metric, including the ones not tracked for productivity like even number of Slack messages sent or raw number of PRs. I think everyone was just closed off from their out of house obligations, especially families with kids who went to a lot of activities that got cancelled. So they worked instead or were just more rested and less exhausted from everything else in their lives.

The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of remote candidates with not so great intent: The overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack once a day or other people who generally just weren’t interested in actually doing work while remote. It started to add up over time. There were also the people who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason everything changed when everyone started WFH.

not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure from anything they had ever known.

Those are not contradictory.

Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.

I think the point was that they are contradictory, yet "data" was shown to indicate they were each sound decisions, implying an inherent dishonesty and willingness to bend data to support an already drawn conclusion.

No, I'm stating that those aren't contradictory. Perhaps they were inaccurate paraphrases of statements that were contradictory, I have no idea. But taking what's written at face value, they are not hard to reconcile. E.g., being productive doesn't necessarily imply innovating.

Not hard to reconcile _if you try in good faith to do so, with the necessary faculties, interest, time, and access_.

This caveat pretty much defines reality.

I... don't really follow.

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