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Comment by holidaygoose | Hacker News Reader

I think we also need to be open minded that maybe 'remote work for everyone' is actually less effective. And it will be hard to show evidence otherwise -- this current test case we're going through -- I doubt people are going to say "wow see, look how productive everyone was during the pandemic when they worked from home."

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Oh, don't get me wrong here: for my own work, I'm 100% work-from-office. I like working in an office with a desk and a proper setup and other people around me also doing the same work. Big fan of NOT doing the "let's have everyone work remote it's AWESOMESAUCE!" thing--it's not awesomesauce for everyone, and there's a huge segment for which it's actively detrimental.

I was just guessing Apple might soften their stance on it a bit, although it sounds from others like that ain't the case (which also doesn't surprise me--Apple gonna Apple).

I like remote work but the benefit of an office, for me, is that it draws a very clear line in the sand between personal and work time. In a field saturated with infinite work queues and constant pressure to empty those infinite queues, it provides physical bounds that are difficult to cross without being obvious.

When you work remote it's assumed you have flexible hours and when people need more or less of your time, they queue it up whenever it's good for them, your freetime and personal life can take the back burner.

I think this really varies on the company. I'd hesitate to make industry wide statements about it... Right now, the company I'm at is treating remote work no different than working from the office. We have core hours and regular meetings. They're just remote. If anything, they're more lenient since about half the people have kids at home right now too. So, they know you can't focus completely...

I've seen plenty of my coworkers staying late at the office or, just as often, having to login at home to do nights and weekends work. So, whatever line in the sand you think exists for office work is purely imaginary. If they want to extract more hours from you, they'll keep pushing until you say no.

> When you work remote it's assumed you have flexible hours and when people need more or less of your time, they queue it up whenever it's good for them, your freetime and personal life can take the back burner.

This is true only insofar as you allow it to be. My coworkers make none of those assumptions about me or my time.

To be fair if you were working remotely, and on a permanent (well, at least 1 year or more) basis, it would probably be easier to afford a place where you can convert a bedroom to an office and to set up your office so that it's easy to focus.

This time of indefinite, could be one month, could be three WFH is kind of a bad demonstration of WFH to a lot of people because it's not worth it to spend too much investing in a good setup.

Massive difference is that schools will be open. Which makes large difference on productivity.

Maximizing the productivity of an all-remote team requires appropriate IT infrastructure, work processes, workspaces, management skills, etc.

I'm concerned that some companies will take a productivity hit during the covid19 outbreak, and fail to attribute some of that hit to their inexperience / unpreparedness with all-remote teams.

Yes, I agree. I’m hiring myself and understand both sides. Some people like to work in the office, that’s fine. However, „would you like to move to the other side of the country when the pandemic is over, all 300 of our engineers are going to be there, you can do work from home once a week”?

There's also a few different issues getting mixed up here. I'm not sure I prefer remote work all things kept equal, but I can have a much better workspace at home than I'm going to get in the typical open-floor-plan office setting.

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