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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

>Data that suggests that WFH is less effective?

If you even have to ask this, you haven't interacted with many normal people working from home. Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. I bet your normal young dev with small child at home (even with their spouse taking care of the kid) does half as much work as they could have had they been at the office.

Yes. yes. offices have brain drain in form of small talk and whatever, but at least you in a different environment and detached from your home. And yes there are some people who have the luxury of separate home office and if you dont have kids then that could easily be better for you. However we aren't maximizing only you but your team, your department, and ideally whole company.

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> Homes are full of distractions

My office has a loud sales team, a loud sales bell, chairs that nearly touch each other back-to-back, A/C that dries out my throat, people who spend 20 minutes chatting at desks, stupid policies that I can't keep up with (and daily moaning about something in Slack) and lots of viruses.

My office has none of that. The biggest distraction is the nice view out of my window.

Horses for courses and YMMV

All it took was a little discipline not to be tempted to some chores doing the day. Pretty easy to overcome that

(Oops, the second "My office" should be "My home office")

> Homes are full of distractions

Offices are even more full of distractions, over which you have far less control.

At home, I can designate my own closed office. I have full control. I can remain distraction-free.

How does that compare to an open-plan office? People constantly walking and talking around you, many of whom have nothing to do with your job. You simply can't control that. You can't control the noise. You can't control being called into useless meetings or getting pulled into senseless distracting conversations. If you're a senior, you might get pinged multiple times every hour by juniors asking for advice, instead of being able to buffer these interruptions once every hour or two. Hard to buffer requests and questions when they are a tap on the shoulder instead of a message waiting in some inbox.

>At home, I can designate my own closed office.

You conveniently left out the part about some people having the luxurity of personal office. The amount of people I see working on their coach or at kitchen table far out weight the amount of people who actually have a whole room dedicated to their work. I for one don't have extra room just for work, but at least I have dedicated computer table, so I dont have to share the kitchen table or the coffee table.

and you conveniently left out the part where we are:

A) Very handsomely paid

B) Not as tied to an expensive city (if remote is an option)

C) Able to ask our employers to pass on office space savings to us.

At least I am not paid enough where I could just buy a bigger apartment with extra room "just because" nor do I live in an expensive city.

Not sure what you earn, but I think the average tech salary can get you an enormous place in a non-centrally located area of basically any city.

Even in the UK, where home prices are exorbitant right now, you can get a 4 bedroom home in the outskirts of Birmingham for the same price of a 2 bedroom flat in central Birmingham.

Heres a couple of homes to show the price difference. Note: that the prices themselves are not relevant only that they're the same.

Flat: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/132806696#/?channel=R...

House: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/131243774#/?channel=R...

>Not sure what you earn

Nowhere close to 500k

I mean, current mortgages are 6x yearly salary.

and current median salaries for senior positions remote from London are 80k GBP

so, yeah, should be ok.

Implying I want to be half a mil in debt for a apartment instead of just... going to the office

I was just giving an illustration of how it is, in one of the most skewed markets for engineer income to house price ratio.

I said if you don't have to live centrally, you can put that money into a bigger house, and it pays significantly more (double the number of bedrooms, not just dedicated office space).

You dont want to do that? thats fine, but you cant pretend that its materially more expensive to have a home office if suddenly you are not geolocked.

>if suddenly you are not geolocked.

But we all are geolocked to some extent or can you just pack up your family and announce that you are moving to Ghana because you found cheap house there? Probably not.

Of course I could take on debt and buy a bigger apartment - probably even from the same building complex - but that feels like insane solution to "going to office every week" unless again you live in America where your commute is 8 hour drive through wild gang lands where you have to be vigilant 24/7 just not to get shot.

Half a mil will buy you a decent house outside of London and very little within it.

Of course that only works if you can work from home for a London based tech company.

From my own experience, I'm very grateful to be able to do that from my home office in the UK, outside of London. I hate long commutes or living in big cities.

The typical engineer will absolutely be able to afford this, especially as their remote status allows them to live in a low-cost location where they can rent a small house with a yard for the cost of 1br in SF.

Again very American thing. I (probably) couldn't afford that kind of rent.

If pay for UK engineers is so low, and housing costs are so high, that you cannot possibly afford a place with a private office - then your condition is materially different than US engineers. So much so that the discussion of your situation should be separate.

Either way, I don't see the point of your arguments. Nobody says that engineers who want to work from the office shouldn't be allowed to. We're just refuting the bogus argument that the office is some sort of distraction-free paradise offering ideal work conditions, compared to noisy WFH setups. Because for the vast majority of US engineers, it's rather the opposite.

Dont know why all of you think I am from UK

It’s a perfectly reasonable question to have asked. Well, of course it’s worse isn’t an answer. Why is it hard to get actual numbers?

My companies productivity numbers all went up after WFH (lots of productivity metrics that we track and publish internally). If the numbers are worse can’t google at least say “we measured productivity before/after and it’s worse”.

This has become some kind of political thing it seems.

>Why is it hard to get actual numbers?

Because we dont have draconian employee tracking. If we had then people would be complaining about that instead.

What? Am I the only one working in a company that measures measures measures? I would be surprised if you work somewhere that cannot measure production of something that equates to value.

Show me a metric you are measuring and I show you a useless gamed metric

Not so draconian to know if people are in the office or at home.

People with small children are in the minority. There are plenty that do not have children and others whose children are old enough and independent enough to go about their day without bothering their parents.

People are only truly productive in short bursts of say 45 minutes or so. WFH offers more opportunities to take these with your flow rather than disruptions midway. There's also additional factors such as fatigue and stress from commutes, lack of rest time before the next day.

How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? I sure haven't since I dont bump into people at my home. But that happened often back in the office days.

It is not only chasing some personal flow state - having physical presence where you can just talk with people has a lot of not so obvious benefits that no amount of emailing or IM-ing or zooming can fix.

I guess it really depends on your team. But with my team 3 our of 8 have multiple young kids constantly disrupting work.

> How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out?

Literally never.

This has never happened to me.

Whereas firing a message into group chat has yielded results all the time, and also effective collaboration on account of we're both at our computers, all the tools are right there, and moving information around precisely is easy.

I've also discovered I don't actually hate pair programming, I just hate trying to crowd a workstation when two-way screen sharing is possible and I can throw multiple 4K monitors at the problem.

On the other hand I definitely quit the second job I ever had after 2 years because I could not deal with the noise in the open plan office, or someone scratching the hell out of a porcelain bowl with a fork every single day right behind me for what seemed like 1.5 hours.

Those interactions do occur via phone call or teams chat. The in office ones tended to be procedural, send me a task. Something they in truth knew the answer to anyway. When they actually wanted help, they'd ask me regardless of the format.

That's poor etiquette on your team members part, a gentle request from your manager to those offenders should help. No different to someone not answering their phone etc. I do believe a more casual approach to taking calls when WFH is best, but that's just taking advantage. Sometimes young parent's are not self aware in my, perhaps controversial opinion (it's understandable it happens kids take over their lives), but don't take it out on the rest of us.

Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids.

Given the choice, every parent I know would choose to work from home with the distraction of their children rather than have to pay something like 25% of their salary on childcare.

Again American issue.

The guy insisting on having an hours long zoom meeting at his desk is actually a lot more distracting than my cat.

(I've mentioned to my boss that we should ban zoom meetings at desks and force people to use meeting rooms, but doesn't seem like anyone is listening to me yet)

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