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Comment by davidmr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m just a grouch in general, but I pray for a time when we have sufficient data available that this ceaseless and monotonous drone of posts about whether remote work is the best thing since sliced bread or if it’s the 7th sign of the apocalypse can just all be replaced by “here are the data and there are some pretty clear conclusions that answer questions X, Y, and Z”.

Anyone who knows more about this than I do, are we close to that day?

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Since, I suspect the answer tends tobe driven by the culture of an organisation, and within individual teams within it, and by the proclivities of individual workers, I fear you may be waiting a long time.

That’s true of any kind of success in any organization, yet there are still studies that show that certain types of traits indicate success at certain types of organizations, etc. Even in a general sense, I’d be happy if these types of conversations could have data-driven discussions.

You need to be careful of cargo culting though. There have been a lot of "traits of successful organizations" types of books and papers over the years. And it often turns out that there are unsuccessful organizations that often have very similar characteristics and successful organizations that take the opposite approach.

Well that’s fair. If it’s all unknowable anyway, I’d be happy to know that. Anything that lessens the blogspam on the topic!

Data would be nice. Open source projects have been studied to some extent looking for communication patterns but, of course, they're probably not representative. The bottom line is that it's going to vary a lot by company culture, what a group does (right now), what type of project is it, historical happenstance, individual preference, etc. I've worked more remote than not for well over a decade but it has varied for a variety of reasons. I've also known people in very similar roles who just preferred to come into the office.

It'll probably be around the same time we get conclusive data on exactly what type of career, relationship, and lifestyle is the best.

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