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Comment by pickdenis | Hacker News Reader

I remember someone quipping on HN about how the Coronavirus outbreak would effectively result in a global WFH experiment. I wonder what lessons, if any, will be learned and if this will have a lasting impact on how much software engineers (and people in similar positions) are expected to physically come to work 5 days a week.

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If I had to guess, not as many as there should be. For WFH to work, you have to have an environment conducive to it. You can't just tell people to stay home and magically solve the problem without a huge productivity hit.

Unfortunately(in this context), I don't think it'll last long enough for those changes to happen.

It might have a negative effect when everyone tries to work from home without making any adjustments and finds it to be sub optimal.

I hope that doesn’t make a bunch of people think that WFH is a failure because it didn’t work when they threw people suddenly into it without the appropriate tools or norms.

A few years back we had an earthquake that forced many organizations to stay away from their offices (just days for some but years/permanently for others) because the buildings were declared unsafe (structural issues, disturbed asbestos, and such).

Long-term, one outcomes of that has been a matured approach to flexible working - The tech (if not already present) was rapidly deployed. The biggest change has been a cultural one. Everyone being forced to work remotely for a period of time killed off those little snarky comments about 'shirking from home' that previously were being made about any employee that dared work remotely. Some organisations used the situation as a springboard to push 'flexible working', made easier at the time by the prospect of moving into new offices and planning fit-outs to support it.

Working from home presents a similar trade-off for organizations as having open-plan offices. You save on office space, but you risk reducing productivity. A watershed event can take you over the cultural hump - Afterwards there's no longer a question of whether you can support flexible working, because you were forced to work through any barriers to it under urgency.

tl;dr strong external driver for something that would otherwise require an unlikely internal drive to accomplish

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