I’ve yet to meet anyone who wasn’t more productive after switching to WfH, HN or otherwise. That seems to be the case for my colleagues as well. If you have some data or experiences that show otherwise, feel free to share them.
Lots of people want it to be true. I feel for those who can't admit how far they've fallen behind due to social disconnection or not being able to trade ideas with colleagues. I wish there were more solid studies done. Many use self-estimated productivity. Some seem to simply be pro-remote work, i.e have that as an agenda. That's fine as an interest of course but doesn't answer the question in terms of forcing everyone, for those it's not a good fit.
My workplace is post-remote now. We're back to fulltime in the office. I'm super happy for all the random interaction, problem solving together and coffee breaks. The social interaction enables us to work better in the team.
The best policy was not the topic of the comment but it's probably to let those who want and like remote work to do it.
> I'm super happy for all the random interaction, problem solving together and coffee breaks. The social interaction enables us to work better in the team.
Ah yes, the pervasive disruptive social din of an office. Unstructured, random and disruptive interactions. How anyone achieves optimal focus and gets into the zone when in an office is beyond me.
I've yet to meet more than a handful of person who says they are more productive WFH that actually are. Even then when digging into it most of them will admit their productivity increase came as the expense of team velocity.
"Team velocity" is just a measure of the teams overall performance. I'm a senior software engineer on my team so a large part of my work is not coding but work that helps the team function: code reviews, mentoring juniors, design discussion, adhoc and planned pair programing, triaging issues that are escalated to engineering from the customer support team, etc. The closest I ever get to sales is maybe joining a call as a technical expert if they need more expertise (or assurances on a big contract deal) than the sale tech expert on our product can provide.
Most of these things really are harder to do remote. I could honestly see how you'd be more productive and have stats to prove it if the vast majority of your responsibilities were just code.
Think of your work output as a vector. It has a magnitude - how much work you can get done in say a quarter. It also has a direction - what is the project you're working on, and does that line up in an economically productive way?
The reason we have corporations and management is to get all those vectors to line up in a certain direction. They're like magnets, aligning the productivity vectors of each IC so they don't compete with each other and instead contribute to a common goal. Almost every IC is less productive in terms of magnitude when working in a big corporation, but because there are thousands of them, the overall product becomes very hard to compete with.
WFH effectively reduces the magnetic force on each employee. Their productivity magnitude increases - they get more individual work done per unit time. But their alignment suffers. It's harder to identify when two IC's work is not going to line up perfectly, and harder to catch problems and complications early, and harder to set a direction in the first place.
And that's where WFH is going to suffer. As long as people can basically continue on the same direction they were going pre-pandemic, it's an improvement. But as soon as a direction shift becomes needed, corporations that have gone all-WFH are going to quickly find that the reason they're a corporation has gone away. They won't be able to adapt and chart a new course, and their employees will all quit and join new startups that are already pointed in the right direction.
I mean, I'm probably less productive. But I'd still take it. I think my effective work hours have halved, but my effective productivity has dropped maybe 10-20%, as I've basically become far more aggressive about doing what matters and not the other bullshit that is maybe 'productive', but has no real value (i.e., write only documentation, synchronous communication sessions over things that don't really matter such as the exact wording of some bit of high level guidance, etc).
So my -efficiency- is higher. Total work productivity, sure, taken a hit.
