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I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same. I keep seeing this narrative that the pande

I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same. I keep seeing this narrative that the pandemic forced everyone to try remote work and surprise! productivity went up. I really, really doubt it. What actually happened is that you had sufficient organizational momentum to keep things going. Your rate of actual creative work (big new stuff launched, etc) has almost certainly cratered. Your new employees are all struggling. If you've had a spike in turnover, the company as a whole is probably struggling. But it's invisible, because you can't keep your finger on the cultural pulse of the company without an office for that culture to manifest in.

paperskull 5y ago
I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code reviews given, and number of features released. All of these metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5 years. While this might not be the experience at every workplace, as far as I can tell, my workplace seems to have greatly benefitted from more remote work.
- gpm 5y ago
  Apart from your first and last metric, all of those are measuring "use of remote communication tools", it would be scary if they went down. (The first and last are interesting though and support your claim.)
EricDeb 5y ago
I would disagree I am personally more productive at home and I love being able to just focus on code without half my brain being distracted by the context of an office. However, I think it's much harder for new employees and weaker engineers because it's difficult to get help/share screen/etc. It's also easy for slackers to slide by which I think just means you need better managers. I also miss the comradery a bit and in-office employees felt like actual friends.

paperskull 5y ago

I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code reviews given, and number of features released. All of these metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5 years. While this might not be the experience at every workplace, as far as I can tell, my workplace seems to have greatly benefitted from more remote work.

gpm 5y ago
Apart from your first and last metric, all of those are measuring "use of remote communication tools", it would be scary if they went down. (The first and last are interesting though and support your claim.)

EricDeb 5y ago

I would disagree I am personally more productive at home and I love being able to just focus on code without half my brain being distracted by the context of an office. However, I think it's much harder for new employees and weaker engineers because it's difficult to get help/share screen/etc. It's also easy for slackers to slide by which I think just means you need better managers. I also miss the comradery a bit and in-office employees felt like actual friends.