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Comment by banach | Hacker News Reader

I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea. It's easy to talk about the importance of meeting face-to-face, when you ignore the opportunity cost of enabling this versus scaling down to more up-to-date spaces that make things like workshops, larger meetings and pair programming truly comfortable, and reinvesting the savings into higher salaries and other benefits. Are the management teams in our industry just waiting for someone to pull the trigger, or are they hoping that no-one will do so, and that everyone will just forget that the pandemic taught us how meaningless commuting to work is?

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I am waiting for the exact opposite. I love WFH, my team loves WFH. All of us will tell you how much more productive we are and Individually we might be. As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.

Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.

> Sooner or later that truth will trickle upwards and we will all be back to a commute and cubicles.

This very might well be the case for your company. However, globally, there are advantages for the employer, and disadvantages for the employee that need to be accounted for. I believe we will start to see salaries diverge between remote and in-office work to adjust for whatever particular situation the company is facing.

Advantages for Company: - A lower salary can be offered. - Employees are less Geo-constrained - Less office space to rent

Disadvantages for Employee: - Harder for junior employees to learn - Social isolation - Lower salary is possible

The situation is likely to be variable from company to company, I have a feeling that soon "remote work" will be an integral part of the identity of each job posting.

So you're saying everyone is more productive when WFH individually, but somehow the team as a whole isn't.

Could you please explain how that works?

Maybe just a management issue, but my team is full of people being really productive at their pet project. When it comes to accomplishing business goals, less so. An effective team needs to effectively work together, and that largely is not happening with remote.

I understand but having worked across multiple remote teams something tells me it's not WFH to blame, rather how it's implemented in your company.

We're doing exceptionally well and my friends from other tech shops have similar experience.

This is just "works on my machine" applied to businesses. If most businesses are struggling with remote work, saying "just get good at it" won't help - they would if they could. Fact is a lot of companies are going to be forced back to in-office because they can't stay competitive otherwise.

This just confirms what I suggested. A "works for me" situation is a clear indication of something wrong with the environment rather than the method.

I think we agree. WFH itself can work with the right environment, but I question wether certain kinds of companies are realistically capable of fostering that environment. Personally I think that if a company finds that it can't do WFH effectively, it shouldn't even be doing tech, and should contract that work out to a company that can WFH. It's like, a code smell for business.

Companies struggle with it because they're not really bought in and have a bias against it. WFH weakens control over the labor pool.

I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH. Some folks may actually be, but now the whole is no longer greater than the sum of its parts where once it was.

> I think it’s a perception issue. We perceive ourselves to be more productive because we have a bias for WFH

Even avoiding the time lost in the commute would make someone more productive. If you add how you avoid having to go through the cognitive load, wear & tear that the commute causes, even further.

Perhaps, but that hits more for personal productivity rather than work productivity, although I agree there could be a slight gain to start without the early commute. However, what I have observed in myself in colleagues is there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.

> there are more midday distractions in WFH (dog walks, answering the door to solicitors, attending to kids, etc…) that don’t generally happen at the office.

Yes, that's a prominent situation with WFH. People may think that you can 'just do stuff' because you are 'at home'. It takes some adaptation to get things work in an organized way so that they wont get in the way of work.

> As a team…we are definitely not more productive and no one wants to say that uncomfortable part out loud.

Can being in a loud, stacked office in front of computers with a bunch of other people be called 'more productive'?

The only thing that exists in such an environment compared to work from home is the supposedly better communication. But how many times do you communicate with a colleague over the course of a single workday. Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work.

In such an equation, the only thing that is necessary for totally replacing work environment seems to be people getting used to collaborating through chat, voice and videos. That should fix the majority of the issues and only leave the watercooler aspect of the office unaddressed.

> Nobody wants to be disrupted when they are concentrating. So people already avoid disrupting each other, limiting the interaction during work

This is where WFH is worse in my experience. Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me. Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected, mainly because products like Teams does a pretty shitty job of conveying status and no one pays its status any respect.

> Because someone cannot see that I am behind a closed door or heads down focused, there are more interruptions to me.

Definitely its necessary to have some organization to adapt to wfh must be done in the household and also the household must be made aware that work is work and its not just someone 'studying in his room' like a teenager or college student.

> Even marking yourself unavailable in chat is often not respected

That's an adaptation on the remote workers' side though. With remote, the communication needs to be async. So people should be able to just drop stuff into chat so the remote people can respond whenever they can. Turning off notices while concentrating is a must for any chat app for that reason. You can turn the notifications off, let the messages pile up while you concentrate, then respond to the messages when you are going through a communication cycle. (unless on call though)

>…adapt to wfh must be done in the household and also the household must be made aware that work is work…

My issue isn't the household, it’s the other remote workers.

You can just ignore their messages and pings when you turn off notifications while you are concentrating - then when you are back you can respond to them. Similarly, you can assume that your messages will be asynchronously processed by your teammates in the same manner. It takes some time to get used to such an async communication style, but it works and its scalable.

> I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea.

When their top investors and board members are often also top investors and board members of the firms that own the commercial real estate, it may be hard for them to come to that realization.

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