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Comment by sumy23 | Hacker News Reader

I love working from home, but I love it because it's personally convenient for me. The quality of my work is definitely lower. I honestly don't know how people think working from home is more effective. Even as an engineer, which is generally not regarded as a highly collaborative job, the lack of collaboration opportunities takes a toll. I find myself spending more hours reading code when I would normally turn around and quickly ask someone how something works. Or when a complex decision needs to be made, I would normally turn to my co-worker and chat with them about pros and cons for a few minutes. Now I don't do that, so I take much more time mulling over options. And then some days, I just want to take a nap, so I do that.

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I don't mean to discount your experience, but I do think that those problems are solvable. There is something about that fluid collaboration that yields a lot, but I don't think being in the same room physically is a hard prerequisite.

I haven't played with Slack's huddle feature but that could be it. I know my small team of 3-4 devs spends most of the day in a breakout room in a big permanent zoom call that we use for that sort of fluidity.

It's also worth keeping in mind for every office worker like yourself there is at least one who would complain about the constant interruptions, so they need to be considered in this equation too. Different work styles.

(Also the absolute societal waste and ecological damage of daily commuting along has me wishing we would mandate WFH for all jobs where it's feasible. A total waste of time and resources, a luxury we don't have anymore as a species.)

Do you not have some sort of work chat? Video calls? Peer review of your work output? I haven't worked with anything with oversight as lax as you are describing in at least a decade.

Yes, of course we have work chat. But everyone is just a little green dot. Often people will be in another meeting or afk, so you'll send a ping and then wait for 30 minutes for them to get back. Or you'll forget to ping them when they're done with a meeting. In person, if someone isn't at their desk, you just wait until they come back, which you know happens because you see them.

interestingly my experience is the opposite. I find that I'm more consistently communicating with a wider variety of people that I might not have interacted a ton with before. I don't have random desk drop-ins pulling me out of work flow, either. Conversations are either consensual or they can wait for later.

This whole thing has made the entire world work the way I want to work, which is pretty much opposite of how it's been for my entire life so selfishly it's pretty great.

> I don't have random desk drop-ins pulling me out of work flow

Yes, in my experience the people who enjoy working from home are those that prioritize their work over the work of others because it allows for fewer "distractions." I'm not saying that people don't distract others frivolously, but I think it's typical that when someone distracts another working person it's because they need immediate help to get unblocked. While the distracted worker may lose out on some productivity, the whole is more productive.

This is definitely not the case - I work quite collaboratively WFH, but I get to filter which conversations about who bought a boat or whose kid is sick or which tv show is great are appropriate for that moment. This comes as a shock to a lot of people who view this kind of smalltalk as essential that it in fact is not all that essential to the thing we are doing, which is completing work.

Interruptions make people forget ideas they had just developed. I send questions to my team’s chat channel all the time and someone will be available to answer pretty quickly (even after business hours), and my teammates also learn from reading the answer. I’m not blocked because I always have other tasks waiting.

> I’m not blocked because I always have other tasks waiting.

Sure, it's not like every time you need to talk to someone you're blocked. But, at least in my experience, it's definitely possible to be blocked waiting for someone. And it might not be a hard block. Like when I want to talk about a design decision with someone, I'm not technically blocked if I can't talk to someone. But I don't really want to continue seriously working on the problem at the same time either.

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