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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

The only winners of remote work will be those who are self disciplined enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation.

That goes for every single field that does remote work - learning, teaching, Knowledge work etc.

But let’s be honest - some people need the motivation of a workplace — and that’s ok!

We are all different. Im somewhere in the middle… love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.

I realize when I need to really buckle up, I go in the office for a few weeks and that puts me back on track with the major projects.

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(For me) while I also get distracted from work while at home, I find it is about the same amount as in an office. The biggest difference is the distractions are far more healthy and productive than the ones I'm left to in an office.

Exactly. In the office, I spent an enormous amount of time on scrolling Reddit and playing games on my phone. At home, I might do the dishes, fold some laundry, take a quick walk, or get some exercise in my small home “gym.” I’m just so much happier working from home. I desperately hope I never have to return to an office.

> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.

For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily grind of commute->stand up->lunch gossip->meetings->commute. I think managers that understand how to develop good software are few and far between.

Productivity aside, your routine sounds awesome and everyone who can should try to achieve something similar without concern for their employer’s productivity. I assure you the concern for well-being is not bi-directional.

There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total.

"I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now" doesn't take you very far.

The best code I’ve ever written was when I was only working 10 hours a week. Hours worked has no positive correlation with quality of code written. Good managers know letting their devs watch birds and relax will result in a much higher quality of output then forcing them into the office and dropping by their desk to prod them.

That depends, though. How many people reading this thread would say, "I'm sitting in my cube surfing the 'net, but trust me I'm totally working right now"?

I've had weeks were i worked 60 hours of crunch, but most weeks, even if i was at the office i work barely more than 25 hours. Between reading tech news, gossip, researching a bit on this totally new tech that seems nice, trying to justify a POC to my n+1/n+2 and preparing slides on "why leaving Jenkins totally make sense", i did so much false work that honestly would annoy me if i was a manager. Now i'm leaving my computer for 30 minute pauses, it is far healthier for me, i'm more effective at my job and i stopped wasting my time and the time of my collegues on meaningless presentations. I still do somes on "clean code" or "how to rework your commits to prepare efficient code reviews", but it is for the benefit of the team, while the one i did pre-covid were for my entertainment.

Good for those people, I have worked plenty of jobs where I really don't actually work much over 20 hours a week and still get top ratings.

Screw the grind culture crap

Well wining and dining has taken management folks quite far and writing same-old CRUD app thousandth time by hand is not gonna take developers very far.

That's lovely. I work in consulting and every hour I get distracted I have to make up at some other point in the day. usually late at night after my kid is asleep.

yes I'm looking for other work...

I have been going into the office when I could work remote.

I don't feel like it is a motivation thing. I was just sick of being home all the time.

I think many people on my team are not doing well mental health wise from being at home so much.

The most miserable people I know are a few software engineers that have been working remote for years making great money. One guy I know works at night because he can. Sleeps to 2pm. Basically, never leaves the house for anything. Seems unable to connect though that being a total shut in is why he is not happy even though he is killing it objectively. Practically hiding from the world in a nice house.

What has been good for my mental health is getting up and actually having to get dressed in the morning. Actually have to get out of the house at a specific time. Seeing people at the office in person. Saying good morning to the security people. Using a fitbit my friend noticed that by 10am they had already done the equivalent of a 20 min walk step wise just going to the office. At home, basically nothing. If you work at home you practically have to do a 90 min walk a day to get enough steps in. Good luck as your conditioning gets worse and worse trying to be happy.

I thought I wanted a non-renote job until I tried it for 6 months. Not for me.

Working from home means living at work. I like my work so mos tlu5fine.

I really enjoy coworking spaces. I don't even if my old one is running anymore but I really want to go back.

imo one of the most important things to learn for longterm survival doing remote work is that you don't have to work from home. i can just as readily work out of the back of my car at a skate spot or do emails and marketing on the chairlift. in the long term i'd like to build a truly portable workspace for backpacking and be able to go fully remote. co-working spaces or the library are good options for many people but really anything that gives you some semblance of normalcy and routine is good enough. hikkimoding is comfy to be sure but the social strain from doing it for an extended period, especially during crunch can be pretty hard mentally, that experience has been pretty universal among the freelancers i've known over the years.

But ... in the office, was the "supervision" really from someone physically looking at you with direct line of sight? I feel like on a remote team, everyone still knows who else is getting stuff done, in part because our work products are digital artifacts which often need attention from our coworkers, whether that's "review this PR", "review this design", "read this email and implement the policy change described in it" etc.

There are some high level stats that suggest that in aggregate, productivity increased with WFH, though I'm not sure how much of that stemmed from people working in the hours that they previously would have commuted.

I think you are totally right about the self motivation part. I’d wonder though is it just that people who aren’t motivated are easier to see in a remote work setting vs the office as you judge people by their tangible outputs alone. In the office setting this is obscured but the same cohort aren’t actually doing anything more or less.

I can be as unproductive at work as I can be at home, but coasting in the office is so exhausting, I'd rather do work.

I can even recall a handful of times when I was trying to solve a fiddly problem, and couldn't concentrate because our (open floor plan) office was a zoo.

I would tell my boss I needed some quiet, would go home, would sit down and solve the problem, and would come back the next day feeling much less frustrated.

I should have done that more often. Open floor, combined with Slack and over-communication made me 4x less productive.

> enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation.

Sounds like a business opportunity

Absolutely. The people who can come up with the right tools to motivate at home workers, will be very rich.

Human failings are always a super-large business opportunity.

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