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Comment by davidguetta | Hacker News Reader

Eh i love remote work but people saying no one is slacking at home show a clear lack of judgement themselves.

I wouldn't bet people arent on average more productive at work office.

And then again, working for Musk is choosing to be working super hard hours anyway.. I'm not sure how that will bother them that much.

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> Eh i love remote work but people saying no one is slacking at home show a clear lack of judgement themselves.

No one is saying "no one is slacking at home". Individuals who don't slack at home are saying "I don't slack at home, and I don't want to be weird tangent punished for your other incompetent employees. If they aren't doing their jobs fire them, I'm not going back, and I'm worth more to your company than you are to me."

+1 to this. I'd go one step further and say that it doesn't matter who is actually slacking at home. The same people probably slack at the office too. In any case, if work from home increases the number of people who slack or the magnitude of slacking, it should be apparent in their performance. If this is set up correctly, you can identify those don't benefit from working from home and have a conversation with them about it.

If all competent employees are equally competent at home but some other slack more at home then WFH is a net negative for the employer. Hence the policy.

Also you're assuming it's possible to control who is slacking / incompetent or not. It's not.. it's a partial information game. Hence the policy.

People should be allowed to do what makes them the most productive, be given feedback and coached if they’re not productive enough and finally let go if that doesn’t work.

That’s how it has always been. There are always many factors affecting one’s performance in person or remote.

It is never possible to control people but you can certainly measure productivity if your management is good.

I stopped reading at "People should". You can do a lot of stuff with should.

I mean I understand your point but the employer's viewpoint is really not hard to see, it's just what I'm saying

people slacking at home slack in office as well no? We've had to experiment with work from home worldwide because of covid. Overall I'm not observing reduced (or improved) productivity

It really depends on your industry, doesn't it?

Supply chain worldwide is still broken due to Covid (China's closure of multiple cities recently), so...

How can we tell to what effect WFH has had to make supply chain worse? If some percentage of people are pretending to work, why couldn't that worsen the issues by some other percentage?

Is it so hard to imagine that people who are home, surrounded by a spouse/so, perhaps children, entertainment systems, a fridge, a bed, no one looking at their monitor, etc... aren't on average more distracted?

I certainly am. We are only human.

I'm certainly not more distracted. Everything you've described is far less distracting to me than your average open office plan.

I am equally distracted at home or office, just by different things. At home, kids, fridge, etc. At the office I lose time to the commute, to moving my car every two hours, to office conversations, etc. I burn time reading HN, watching basketball stats and researching roadtrips from either location so they even out.

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