I am full time remote for past 6mo. Never been less productive in my career. I'm looking to switch back to onsite as soon as I can.
Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
Edit: I'm not saying remote is bad - just that in my experience I'm definitely less productive.
I've worked remotely for about 5 years now. Without the water cooler talk, chit chat, and misc distractions, I can easily fit a 8+ hour day into less than 6 hours when I work from home.
I’ve worked with new hires that literally take entire days off and give excuses why they were unreachable. Sadly they are just shuffled around the company instead of disciplined but that’s another topic. But I figure in that case, they were probably not so great workers in-office either.
But I can't really imagine how I would have done well working remotely towards the beginning of my career. It was a different time with far fewer communication tools but, even taking that out, it would have been very difficult both socially and in terms of work discipline.
I suppose that could be one measure of productivity. Another view would be an increase in the number of backlog items closed in the 8hour.
One thing that has really helped me I’d having a non-work group of online friends who also all work remote. We can commiserate and trade tips.
I work half of the time remote and sometimes feel very unmotivated due to lack of human contact. Having someone to just chat with would be awesome. Neat idea I wonder if there is a discord chat for that.
As an example, I'm currently working on a proof of concept using Rust to replace some existing C++ that coordinates some Gstreamer pipelines. This sounds like the perfect task for remote: self contained task, redoing existing code, fairly small scope. But remote (or more specifically the time difference) makes it pretty difficult. I don't know Gstreamer that well, and I don't know the existing code that well. I'll often run into a problem that I KNOW someone on my team could answer in 2minutes, and unblock me. Instead I need to push through wasting valuable time trying to figure it out myself, or wait till they are online. Perhaps this is the time difference not the remote aspect at fault. If they were on the same timezone, it'd be a quick Slack message away
Now, I am reduced to writing code that slots in around my team. As for actual empirical metrics, I don't have many. We tend to track achievements as a team (OKR's etc), and my team has been hitting there goals mostly. I do feel we could achieve more though if I was onsite. A probably non valuable one might be Github commit count, which dropped from ~ 3500 for the 2018 year to ~ 300 for the last 6 mo. So at least on code alone, I am churning substantially less of it out.
I'm not poo-pooing remote btw. I think my story would be totally different in a 100% remote company, or a company with substantial remote presence. I think for me though, in this situation, I prefer on site.
Not to say that your issue might not be remote in general, but for me I definitely think that having much more than the 3 hour difference I currently have with my team would be tricky: just too much time where someone is waiting for someone else.