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The key thing is here: > over the first six months of 2020 Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience

The key thing is here: > over the first six months of 2020 Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote work yet, and people were still struggling a lot with the tools (say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months). I'd be interested in a follow-up that analyzes the same time period but for 2021.

goodells 5y ago
I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk. Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).
- kahmeal 5y ago
  Elsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from me.
  - earthscienceman 5y ago
    "We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"
    - kiklion 5y ago
      It kind of depends on the details. My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment. The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices. There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.
      - stefan_ 5y ago
        Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of productivity?
      - fragmede 5y ago
        Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore. If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions), saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!) If some of those savings aren't passed onto their employees, those employees will choose to move to a different company that has a more general WFH allowance, probably get a raise in the process, and work with a company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.
        Sanguinaire 5y ago
        Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.
      - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
        The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art equipment for their home office is at most a few months of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay for employee happiness and productivity. Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.
        ghaff 5y ago
        The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have it at this point or don’t really care. But you’re not going to get paid to move from your urban studio to an apartment with an office though some companies did pay for coworking spaces when there was no office for employees to commute to pre-pandemic.
    - nikau 5y ago
      To be fair you could put your commuting costs into a piggybank and after a year you would likely have enough for a decent chair and monitor.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    It’s always at “your own expense.” Me and my partner who also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?
rickspencer3 5y ago
First half of 20/20 was really hard on a lot of people: the pandemic, civil unrest, political instability. It was a difficult time for sure. Then there is the whole shock of kids at home from school, spouses at home, potentially lost jobs, etc.. That said, I suppose it is intuitive to think that a bunch of people leaving campus life and suddenly working from home would have an adjustment period anyway. I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their dependent variables to "other research suggests less innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote work is just as good as a campus environment. I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a different environment and different way of collaborating than working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure. Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I attended included many people calling in to their video conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home. I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their way to a remote work situation anyway.
kongin 5y ago
They should do a follow up study on how many people will die from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how preventable deaths impact innovation in teams. From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies. The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers convenience.
- technofiend 5y ago
  Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain full herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you always have people too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I'm not an epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the background. Bleh.
  - Sanguinaire 5y ago
    Nature is correcting for our artificially enhanced lifespans thanks to modern medicine. Life, uh, finds a way.
- runamok 5y ago
  Just guessing deaths from commuting the average amount would dwarf that number and it never stopped them from wanting you in the office before.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
I was set up for working from Home. Home schooling 2 preteens is what has killed my productivity.
cortesoft 5y ago
Not to mention kids being at home. I got so little work done that first few months until daycare opened back up. You can’t do much work with a one year old and a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the few moments of quiet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The key thing is here: > > over the first six months of 2020 This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work. One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with. It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.
- doktorhladnjak 5y ago
  So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams. Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together. Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams. Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time. Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.
  - DrJokepu 5y ago
    As someone who manages people for a living, the problems on Team 2 were entirely your manager’s fault.
    - quelltext 5y ago
      What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?
      - kbenson 5y ago
meowface 5y ago
>say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they added support for custom video backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really affect the experience of the app itself. I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord, which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams, the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord. And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off. Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.
- hunter-gatherer 5y ago
  This is my experience exactly. Teams is also somewhat easy to get lost in once you get a lot of rooms open. Our IT department has decided to use Teams as a ticketing system. My manager decoded to use Teams as a PTO calendar by assigning tasks to yourself. All we really needed was a good chat app for private conversations and small teams... I don't know why companies have such a hard time solving these kinds of issues.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones. The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.
  - meowface 5y ago
ren_engineer 5y ago
I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html >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.
- midasuni 5y ago
  > But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That’s a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17 years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception rather than the norm.
nikau 5y ago
> say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic Yet for some reason they refuse to implement simple improvements with thousands of comments on their feature request site, 2 simple ones that could probably be implemented in a day: 1. Option to disable [read more] 2. Option to make the mute toggle hotkey global so it works when the app is not in focus
scrumbledober 5y ago
And beyond experience and environment for working from home, there was an incredible amount of stress from circumstances outside of work...
p2t2p 5y ago
cmd+k -> @jdoe -> enter, /zoom -> enter, click “join”

goodells 5y ago

I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk. Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).

kahmeal 5y ago
Elsewhere at their own expense? Yea that's gonna be a no from me.
- earthscienceman 5y ago
  "We used to pay for entire buildings to house our employees, but covid made us realize we can pass that cost on to them!"
  - kiklion 5y ago
    It kind of depends on the details. My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment. The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices. There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.
    - stefan_ 5y ago
      Because you are saving pennies but losing dollars of productivity?
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore. If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions), saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!) If some of those savings aren't passed onto their employees, those employees will choose to move to a different company that has a more general WFH allowance, probably get a raise in the process, and work with a company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.
      - Sanguinaire 5y ago
        Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.
    - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art equipment for their home office is at most a few months of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay for employee happiness and productivity. Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have it at this point or don’t really care. But you’re not going to get paid to move from your urban studio to an apartment with an office though some companies did pay for coworking spaces when there was no office for employees to commute to pre-pandemic.
  - nikau 5y ago
    To be fair you could put your commuting costs into a piggybank and after a year you would likely have enough for a decent chair and monitor.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  It’s always at “your own expense.” Me and my partner who also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?

rickspencer3 5y ago

First half of 20/20 was really hard on a lot of people: the pandemic, civil unrest, political instability. It was a difficult time for sure. Then there is the whole shock of kids at home from school, spouses at home, potentially lost jobs, etc.. That said, I suppose it is intuitive to think that a bunch of people leaving campus life and suddenly working from home would have an adjustment period anyway. I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their dependent variables to "other research suggests less innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote work is just as good as a campus environment. I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a different environment and different way of collaborating than working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure. Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I attended included many people calling in to their video conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home. I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their way to a remote work situation anyway.

kongin 5y ago

They should do a follow up study on how many people will die from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how preventable deaths impact innovation in teams. From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies. The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers convenience.

technofiend 5y ago
Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain full herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you always have people too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I'm not an epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the background. Bleh.
- Sanguinaire 5y ago
  Nature is correcting for our artificially enhanced lifespans thanks to modern medicine. Life, uh, finds a way.
runamok 5y ago
Just guessing deaths from commuting the average amount would dwarf that number and it never stopped them from wanting you in the office before.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

I was set up for working from Home. Home schooling 2 preteens is what has killed my productivity.

cortesoft 5y ago

Not to mention kids being at home. I got so little work done that first few months until daycare opened back up. You can’t do much work with a one year old and a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the few moments of quiet.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The key thing is here: > > over the first six months of 2020 This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work. One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with. It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.

doktorhladnjak 5y ago
So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams. Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together. Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams. Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time. Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.
- DrJokepu 5y ago
  As someone who manages people for a living, the problems on Team 2 were entirely your manager’s fault.
  - quelltext 5y ago
    What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?
    - kbenson 5y ago

meowface 5y ago

>say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they added support for custom video backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really affect the experience of the app itself. I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord, which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams, the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord. And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off. Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.

hunter-gatherer 5y ago
This is my experience exactly. Teams is also somewhat easy to get lost in once you get a lot of rooms open. Our IT department has decided to use Teams as a ticketing system. My manager decoded to use Teams as a PTO calendar by assigning tasks to yourself. All we really needed was a good chat app for private conversations and small teams... I don't know why companies have such a hard time solving these kinds of issues.
Aeolun 5y ago
> I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones. The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.
- meowface 5y ago

ren_engineer 5y ago

I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html >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.

midasuni 5y ago
> But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern
- ghaff 5y ago
  That’s a very Silicon Valley tech influenced meme.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17 years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

nikau 5y ago

> say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic Yet for some reason they refuse to implement simple improvements with thousands of comments on their feature request site, 2 simple ones that could probably be implemented in a day: 1. Option to disable [read more] 2. Option to make the mute toggle hotkey global so it works when the app is not in focus

scrumbledober 5y ago

And beyond experience and environment for working from home, there was an incredible amount of stress from circumstances outside of work...

p2t2p 5y ago

cmd+k -> @jdoe -> enter, /zoom -> enter, click “join”