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One of the interesting things that happened at my company is that productivity instantly doubled when we started working remotely. The reality at my company is

• thenewwazoo 5y ago
  Did it really double, or did boundaries erode? My company has been very clear in that they are measuring our productivity and also our working hours. Managers are being instructed to be very clear about establishing work/life boundaries (with the specifics being based on individual need). We similarly saw an increase in productivity, but the increase was far smaller once normalized for hours worked.
  • TimTheTinker 5y ago
    Productivity at my workplace went significantly up (and stayed up), but management has been clear that personal time is sacred, and I hardly ever see anyone on slack after work hours. Honestly, the biggest impediments to productivity at my workplace have nothing to do with where we work and everything to do with management style (heavy-handed Agile/Scrum, micromanagement, the works).
  • idrios 5y ago
    I'm surprised this perspective is not made more often. It's now much easier to work past 5 or 6pm or whenever you would normally end. Needing to return home to your family is no longer an excuse to stop working because you can be with your family while at work. All it takes is one developer on your team working evenings or weekends for the other developers to feel like they need to be working late too. There's also the fact that managers right now are more concerned about whether their team is working enough, rather than being concerned about their team working too much.
    • ricardobeat 5y ago
      I find myself doing the opposite. It's much easier for me to step away at 6pm sharp knowing that if anything happens I can jump back in an instant, vs the worry of being the first to leave the office, and being stuck in a train for a half hour.
      • jlarocco 5y ago
        Funny how different people are on this. When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do. For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc. and next thing I know an hour's passed by so I'm working late or feeling guilty. I've been working on my time management, in general, and that's helping.
        • slavapestov 5y ago
          > For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc. Sometimes taking a short break like that is the best way to make progress on a difficult problem though. Realistically we probably get 2 or 3 hours of actual work done in a day. Everything else is a bonus and it comes and goes over time.
          • nandhinianand 5y ago
            I've been running rescuetime on my computer for most of a decade, and "my developer time"(time on terminal, few documentation sites like SO, editor etc...) goal was initially 1hr 30 minutes, but nowadays it is stuck at 3 hours.. and been not filled except for rare days.
        • sneak 5y ago
          > When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do. A lot of it is scarcity vs abundance mindset. Many people are quite scared to lose their jobs. I know people making six figures who would be in deep shit if they had a month of no paychecks while switching jobs.
  • lambdasquirrel 5y ago
    Well then the flip side is that we're also no worse off working remote.
  • dstroot 5y ago
    Would anyone like to expound on how productivity is being measured? What metrics are used? What unintended consequences come up from the metrics? Can they be gamed?
    • codazoda 5y ago
      It's pretty easy to game "working hours" when you're remote. Even an always on camera probably isn't enough and I wouldn't want my team to work under those conditions. I'm also curious what productivity measures are being watched, especially for developers.
• passivate 5y ago
  How does your company measure productivity?
  • postalrat 5y ago
    Probably with their guts.
• perfunctory 5y ago
  > 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable Yes, yes, yes. I am totally convinced that we can all start working 20 hours per week starting next Monday and the world will just keep going as normal. Only we will be healthier, happier and richer.
  • deadmutex 5y ago
    Problem is that if one company works 20 hours a week, and another works 40 hours a week. The 40 hour/week company will get more done. Also, imagine if your doctor only worked 20 hours a week.
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      I doubt that. The point is that 20 hrs a week * 100% ~= 40 hrs a week * 50%. And most people top out at a few hours of productivity a day. Beyond that, we solve that problem with government regulation. If companies really need to run 24/5 they can just go to 6 shifts instead of 3.
    • endlessvoid94 5y ago
      I used to think this. But, I've learned that it assumes a bunch of things that aren't really true at many, many companies: - Clear goals that the team is bought into - Productive people who can sustain emotional enthusiasm for extended time periods - An environment where intrinsically motivated people can thrive, and/or incentives for extrinsically motivated people - A healthy feedback loop so people know when they're improving and are rewarded for it - etc Looked at this way, a team of 5 people working 20 hours per week in this type of company can vastly outperform a team of people working 40 hours per week at a company that lacks the above items. (And I'm probably missing some)
      • PraetorianGourd 5y ago
        That isn't how comparisons work though. You can't compare a 20-hour/week company with good culture to a 40-hour/week company with toxic culture. You have two variables uncontrolled in that comparison. Compare both companies at 40 or both at 20. The good-culture-40-hour would outperform the both the good-culture-20-hour and bad-culture-40-hour so why wouldn't all companies aim for 40/hours with a good culture? It could be argued that it is impossible to have a good culture and 40 hours, but that needs a lot of analysis.
• deadmutex 5y ago
  What percentage of your company had parents of infants/toddlers at your company? Is it very diverse? Childcare was practically nonexistent during early phase of the pandemic.
  • gtaylor 5y ago
    And it's crushingly expensive even in better times.
• fastasucan 5y ago
  This is a refreshing perspective that takes into the reality of what humans are able to do, over time. Quite a good idea as well, why not spend some time taking walks, doing housework, and being in nature rather than standing and chatting by the watercooler/coffe machine, having meetings with no benefit or trying to surf the web without anyone noticing.
• api 5y ago
  Don't forget commute times, which can be bad especially in high cost of living cities where you have to live really far from things to afford a decent place. For us it saved everyone an average of 1-2 hours per day. Also consider the energy savings. Commuting by car every day uses tons of energy. Of course this is somewhat offset by more HVAC being consumed by houses, but I highly doubt that totally erases the savings from not driving so much. Cars are very energy intensive.
• MarkSweep 5y ago
  At my previous company this was only true for a week or two. Then some VP discovered how to use MS Teams and the daily two hour meeting started.
• babyshake 5y ago
  You can have pointless meetings remotely. Actual socialization seems to be the more difficult (and desirable) thing to reproduce.
• megablast 5y ago
  This sounds like complete bullshit. There is no way this is true. What are you measuring?? I would love to be proven wrong.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Not the person you asked, but work has objective measures of the organization (bugs closed, number of commits, etc), and those doubled. Then management said they thought planning and roadmap would implode, but those also (subjectively) went much better than usual this year, with written down decisions, and discrete decision points instead of useless repeated verbal syncs. Also, it seems as though fewer high profile things slipped than usual, but that’s hard to measure year-to-year. Finally, surveys say a large majority of the employees strongly prefer indefinite part or full time work from home.
• closeparen 5y ago
  Pointless meetings have multiplied for me in the remote world as they are no longer constrained by conference rooms. Also since it’s so much easier to get away with multitasking, you have engineers who are ostensibly in meetings all day still checking in code like everything’s fine. I think the ability to maintain a convincing presence in all-day Zoom while still getting your work done is the new meta-game for engineering. And I hate it.
  • eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Urban Airship meeting rules. Don’t just mention them or be inspired by them. Just… use them as you see fit. Walk out on meetings, or decline them, if they don’t benefit you or your work. Don’t tolerate meetings that could have been an email (or equivalent communication). Don’t fill the time. Don’t repeat things that were already communicated.
    • schoolornot 5y ago
      Lots of egregious violations of #4 and #5 where I work. Leaving a meeting or not even showing up to one even if only to just "observe" comes off as passive aggressive.
    • snth 5y ago
      "Don't repeat things that were already communicated": This sounds good, but it takes several repetitions for information to sink in with everyone everywhere I've worked. I don't know a way around this.
  • xivzgrev 5y ago
    Many meetings only require a low level of attention. 90% is 1 or a few stakeholders discussing things, and the rest are there for occasional input. In a good chunk of my meetings I find myself actually tuning out too much, where I miss some important nuances because it was buried in the rest of the shit. In an office you are forced to pay attention (laptops away…). It’s a new skill to balance between paying attention to irrelevant shit and missing the important details
• ArtB 5y ago
  > the rest is socialization, pointless meetings, lunches, or trying to look busy. The parts that for me made the job bearable. The rest is legacy support for CRUD apps. The office is a perk for people with few other outlets.
• duxup 5y ago
  I worked at a company where the support team was moved temporarily next to the HR team. Someone in HR somehow found a way to complain that "they're not very social and they're always at their desks working". I was kind of blown away that somehow that could be a thing to complain about.
• henrikschroder 5y ago
  > One of the interesting things that happened at my company is that productivity instantly doubled when we started working remotely. It is well established in literature on workplace studies that any major change to a workplace results in short-term productivity boosts. Some changes result in long-term productivity boosts.
  • burlesona 5y ago
    That’s interesting, I’d never heard that before. Where could I read more about that?
    • scatters 5y ago
      Start with Wikipedia: novelty effect, Hawthorne effect.
  • itsdrewmiller 5y ago
    I don't think this is well established at all, despite what Peopleware said about the Hawthorne Effect - see the criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretation_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Interpretatio...
• reader_x 5y ago
  Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic because in the pandemic the other ways we could spend our time were so limited. In contrast, right mow I could be at the gym, having a long lunch with a friend, doing errands… The new freedom and temptation to do those things will gradually undermine the remote option, until bosses finally tire of the cat and mouse and everyone must go back to their cubicles.
  • mech422 5y ago
    >>Remote work productivity mid-pandemic won’t necessarily translate post-pandemic None of the 'problems' you mention will necessarily come to pass either. Unless you have a crystal ball, you're future is no more likely then any other... Having worked from home for 20 years now, I can tell you that hasn't been my experience.
• wkirby 5y ago
  My company’s core philosophy is that there are only 20 productive “creative” hours of coding in the average week. We employ our devs and ask that they aim for 17 hours of billed time to our clients; the remaining 3 hours is spent on our internal sync and calls with clients. The rest of the week is theirs: if they want to keep coding, do it; if they want to mow the lawn, that’s great too. After almost 8 years with this model, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we maintain somewhere between 85 and 90% of the productive output of our 40+ hour/week counterparts. I’m excited at the prospect of a positive shift in work/life balance coming out of the massive WFH experiment that’s happened over the past 18 months.
  • throwaway6734 5y ago
    This sounds like a fantastic place to work.
    • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      Seconded. I've never had a place where I wasn't supposed to bill a full 40 hours and it's hell. Any distraction or disruption ends up eating into your not work time, or you fudge the numbers and bill for work when you're not working. I could absolutely be fully productive and provide the most value to the client for 20 hours a week.
    • wkirby 5y ago
      It's ok. The workers refuse to unionize though, which is a real problem.
      • spopejoy 5y ago
        Can you elaborate, what do you think a union would provide that's missing? Also, are you in management there (and thus more pro-union than the rank-and-file which is quite remarkable)?
        • wkirby 5y ago
          I’m a cofounder. At a surface level this is a running joke between me and my team: they won’t unionize no matter how many times I insist they do. More fundamentally I come from a strong Union family. My father is a professor, my grandfather worked for petrochemical companies after the war, his father came from West Virginia and so on. I think that the high salaries and plentiful amenities gloss over the need for a real strong union presence in software. It’s exactly when workers have the power that they ought to capitalize to entrench that power. All we have to do is look at how companies like Amazon churn through H1B workers to see how brutal dev work _can_ be. While development skills are still a relatively scarce commodity we owe it to the next generation of bit pushers to create a strong voice for the rights of labor. Our power as a workforce can then be better leveraged to improve conditions for workers everywhere. Unions are not — and have never been — perfect, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to fight for fair labor practices in every industry.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  >productivity instantly doubled Looks like the 'science' of in-the-office productivity needs some new theories.
• brundolf 5y ago
  > the reality of working from home is that 20-30 hour work weeks need to be acceptable and we should use the rest of our time on non-working things Privately this is what I end up doing anyway, and it works out pretty well
• Uberphallus 5y ago
  The opposite happened in mine: people missed socialization so much that the number of pointless meetings exploded. I just checked and I've been on the phone for 19 hours last week (out of a 35h work week), and I'm only attending like half of them that are actually related to work, i.e. skipping meetings that are just for coffee and talk, lunch break videogames, and whatever they do in the discord (yes, they created a discord to "keep in touch"). The best was last summer when we had a 2/3 office/home split, which left people happy in terms of social contact and at least I could work from home without nonsense for 3 days.
• onion2k 5y ago
  I've worked remotely for years on and off from the past two decades and I understand that you can't just work remotely. You have to socialize as well. Many companies think 'remote work' is about work, and that is far from true. Every aspect of 'work' needs to be done remotely. If you're not socialising and doing fun things remotely then people will grow increasingly isolated and eventually quit.