Hacker News Reader

Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

a friend of mine is a productivity researcher at a notable tech company. She studies all sorts of signals like hours worked , number of meetings , output artifacts like landed commits and docs created etc . overall productivity increased with lockdown , but work efficiency actually went down. basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down .

burnout is real

View on HN

That metric of "basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down" sounds like people doing busy-work to look busy and fill their calendars because its harder to signal that you are 'there' when working remotely. Useless meeting time increased dis-proportionally, and by useless I mean "this could have been a self-documenting email conversation".

Even email is, for many thorny issues, much less efficient, potentially, than a phone call or a real face to face meeting. And phone calls have fallen out of style.

I can’t help but think of how many email chains stretching out over weeks could’ve been resolved in 5 minutes if everyone were in the same room (and not in a meeting context, but standing up near a computer) and were insistent on actually getting the problem solved.

I've also worked placed that prided themselves on this approach and it wasn't really any better in my experience.

You end up in more sessions where your presence probably isn't necessary, but it's hard to be sure ahead of time so there you are. Also a hilariously high percentage of these "problem solving sessions" ended with the need for someone to go off and attempt or research something individually and then bring the results back. Which... should have just been an email yeah.

Yeah, I’m not sure that formalizing it in sessions would help. Just having people around can help.

> basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down .

I’ve managed remote teams for many years. This is basically the hallmark of a poor transition to remote work: Everyone is working more but getting less done.

Remote work is hard. Many people aren’t fit for remote work (employee or manager), even if they think they want it. Remote requires a lot more work overall to communicate and coordinate, but companies are tempted to treat it like it’s the same as in-office work. It’s not.

Not fit?

Are they too weak to withstand the temptations that come with so much freedom?

Are they incapable of self-motivation? Do they need an office-parent to kick them into gear?

Can this power be acquired?

I wish only to serve better. Please sir, you teach me.

I don't think this establishes the presence of burnout. It's an expected result of increasing workload at any level and is caused by the diminishing returns to labor as an input of production.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com