4 ms·

I'm sure these mythical people exist but I never run into them. Every coworker I've met that is more "effective" at home is really just trading team velocity fo

I'm sure these mythical people exist but I never run into them. Every coworker I've met that is more "effective" at home is really just trading team velocity for personal velocity. They feel more productive by getting more of "their stuff" done but it happens at the expense of the overall teams speed.

runako 5y ago
> just trading team velocity for personal velocity. The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way. What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as: - critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit) - that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down - team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person - team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff - etc. It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded." Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste. This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.

runako 5y ago

> just trading team velocity for personal velocity. The entire team at an in-person org pays a global commuting tax. Employees are not an idealized frictionless surface; if they have to commute to work, that comes out of their productive capacity in some way. What you are describing here is a team that is not managed well. If I had to guess, that team would exhibit features such as: - critical information only shared in meetings and not recorded in writing (or recorded in a place the team does not use as habit) - that same critical information re-discovered in subsequent meetings because it was not written down - team cadence extremely sensitive to PTO because key knowledge is only accessible by speaking to the relevant person - team cadence extremely sensitive to staff onboarding/replacement because both of these require hands-on in-person time from existing staff - etc. It's worth noting that all of these inefficiencies are experienced as "progress" by the team: "we made a key decision" (that we had decided and not written down a month prior) feels like something positive. "I spent most of today helping X get ramped up" also feels like an accomplishment rather than the more correct "our documentation and process is so opaque that we lost $X of engineering time today when an engineer was required to help another get onboarded." Essentially, teams that need to be in-person to function typically underutilize the old technology (writing) and because so many teams work that way, most people do not notice how much time they waste. This is not every team that leans heavily on in-person interaction; obviously there are outliers that are capable of using the technology of the written word while also augmenting with high-bandwidth interactions.