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Comment by pcan77 | Hacker News Reader

I am still absolutely baffled at how they don't realize how much more productive most people are at home. Where I work we have to go in 2x a week and those days are just PACKED with meetings, or on campus activities planned by management, etc. Barely any work gets done by anyone, it's ridiculous.

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Nobody cares. Forcing people into the office does not have anything to do with productivity.

Forget productivity for a second (it's a fool's errand to make any claims here)-- WFH means you're able to retain top talent even as they move to non tech hubs. For a variety of reasons folks need to live outside tech hubs and limiting yourself to the bay area (or seattle). Good staff+ engineers are very rare as it is.

RTO is mostly about profit for the real estate investors who happen to be in big corps boards.

Your baffled that less work gets done on days that are full of meetings?

It’s wild to me that people don’t consider meetings work. Does everyone else work at a place where they’re told exactly what to build and they never have to talk to anyone else about what they’re building?

It's just a question of proportions. If people organize meetings that are not directly related to my tasks, enforce camera on policy and so on, they are not respecting my time and negatively impacting my productivity. On the other hand, calls with my team about the tasks at hand are extremely useful and can save a lot of typing. And usually they are quite short unless we decide the problem is so hard we need to work on it together, which rarely happens.

It's wild to me that you don't seem to realize around 75% of meetings could have been a short email. Meetings are where middle management gets to strut their stuff, and by stuff I mean the latest stupid trend stemming from what amounts to a self help book for organizations. Where "people engineers" get to waste everyone's time with "team building". Where productivity goes to die. The meetings that matter and actually contribute to actionable decisions in my experience no one bitches about. That isn't what most meetings are.

.. because the work you accomplish is not the only factor, not even close.

say more

It's about the work you convince others, especially higher ups, that you've done, and its value to them personally and to the org and company.

thank you for saying more

Every time I’m back in the office, it’s like the last few weeks of repressed communication and collaboration all comes out. So we spend very little time grinding away solo, but all these little details and knowledge sharing all occur and it’s highly valuable even if it didn’t directly relate to jira tickets moved on that day.

Discrete individual contributions on individual days do not represent company wide performance. The people I know who are going in to the office are surrounded by junior employees who have no idea what's going on. The people I know who think they're more productive say they've "avoided interruptions" which are by and large productive for the company.

These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.

That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.

It is doubtful they have robust objective data. Much more likely, a suit asked someone to get data to justify RTO, someone found some metrics that look better within people who RTO'd voluntarily, and they are using it to justify their hypothesis without anyone having the balls/organizational clout to push back critically.

When we all went remote during the pandemic, we were told by senior leadership that our productivity had measurably increased.

Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.

We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.

Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.

Place I work at ended up dropping all juniors because they hadn’t got up to speed after a year and a bit.

Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”

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