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Comment by dgoldstein0 | Hacker News Reader

I wish some of these companies doing a return to office could share the data driving their decisions - and follow up with the impact. I suspect, but have no real data to prove, that an in office culture could enhance collaboration - within teams, across teams etc; my intuition is that there is more overhead to get the same people in sync when working remotely, than in an office - but I wonder if data anywhere shows that (and for what sort of return - very easy for these 2-3 day a week returns to not achieve all of the benefits). All these articles reporting about return to office never have any data to share though.

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The collaboration thing isn't as simple as it seems though. Yes it becomes easier to reach people, but that means it also becomes easier to disrupt people.

If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly more than if I am disrupted by one big thing in that same hour.

For a tech analogy (we're on HN after all), being in the office reduces latency but in doing so can also reduce throughput.

For the kind of work managers do latency can be critical, so from their perspective being in the office is extremely helpful. Other can be most productive when given large amounts of time to focus on a single task in which case latency is far less critical.

>> If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly

But those 5 people who interrupted you are no longer blocked. If they had to schedule a call with you tomorrow or the next day then the overall productivity of the team could very well drop.

Companies care less about your individual productivity and more about the productivity of the entire organization.

Or more likely they could have sent me a message and still received their update within the hour, all without interrupting me.

If you don't have anything else you could be doing for that whole hour you probably aren't that busy anyway, in which case waiting won't hurt you too much.

The office I worked in pre pandemic had a pretty clear "don't bother people wearing headphones" etiquette. With a variation of that it seems like you could be fine?

There is no data.

And even if there was they would never include ALL data, e.g. you have to weigh paying rent in Hong Kong, New York, Sydney, San Francisco, London etc etc expensive places for an office building that a remote-only work place doesn't need.

Being 5% more productive in office might not make up for billions of dollars in rent and overhead.

Not productivity driven. It's a lazy way to do layoffs...

How would you measure it quantitatively though?

I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board. Or just random stuff I learn from water cooler conversation triggers thoughts in me that help me move quickly on a problem.

But it's very difficult to quantify these things. If these things were tickets, I would track their time to close, but they're not.

Surveys - need to baseline, first, though

Surveys capture stated preferences, not revealed ones.

Capturing sentiment is useful in itself — it is a kind of data point.

But to really see the productivity difference you need an instrument based less on what people say, but what they actually do.

Weren't those surveys already done around 3.5 years ago when the pandemic first hit? I seem to recall companies like Microsoft reporting increased productivity when going remote. The same sort of thing happens when you start looking at 4 day work weeks as well.

(Sorry, I don't have links to any of those surveys/survey reports/data, so if you want to call me out, I'm just going to plead the 5th on being a little lazy.)

>I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board.

Why don't you just give them a call? What's the difference?

For everyone who misses being able to have a quick chat with a coworker, there is another person who is glad that they can get in a work flow without random coworkers coming over to talk about something they aren't currently working on.

It’s fundamentally different. Barring the fact that it’s lower friction to approach someone in person because you can read if they’re busy (you can accomplish the same with a online status but they have to trigger it or you have to send a chat message asking is now is a good time to talk), calling someone is way more intrusive.

It’s also lower bandwidth in terms of communication. Losing the ability to gesture and point and to write on a board in real life is significant. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but it is.

> there is another person who is glad that they can get in a work flow without random coworkers coming over to talk about something they aren't currently working on.

In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems. Richard Hamming (of Hamming window, Hamming distance fame) noted this in the 1980s and wrote about it in “you and your research”

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

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Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.

>It’s fundamentally different. Barring the fact that it’s lower friction to approach someone in person because you can read if they’re busy

I remember being approached all the time while I was busy. I don't think most people are "reading" anything. They are just interrupting."Lower friction" in this case means its harder for a person who is busy to ignore an interruption when it is standing at their desk.

>In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems.

I'm not sure how this relates to what we are talking about. You can be "generally aware of goings on" without being interrupted every 30 minutes.

>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.

This reads as generic corporate leader woo. I regularly have discussions with my coworkers and i know what's going on.

The 'stop by chat' crowd just doesn't understand how to communicate effectively and is upset that they can no longer use inefficient channels to get information.

I see where you’re coming from but I just have a different view borne out of a different experience. I’m not one to tolerate interruptions well either but it’s not corporate leader woo to entertain unstructured serendipitous conversations (low signal to noise but the occasional fortuitous signal is worth the pain).

While I agree... We can't really define productivity, let alone measure it. And that's for a manager who WANTS to be open and data driven...

It’s not productivity data driven.

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