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>Data that suggests that WFH is less effective? If you even have to ask this, you haven't interacted with many normal people working from home. Homes are full

>Data that suggests that WFH is less effective? If you even have to ask this, you haven't interacted with many normal people working from home. Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. I bet your normal young dev with small child at home (even with their spouse taking care of the kid) does half as much work as they could have had they been at the office. Yes. yes. offices have brain drain in form of small talk and whatever, but at least you in a different environment and detached from your home. And yes there are some people who have the luxury of separate home office and if you dont have kids then that could easily be better for you. However we aren't maximizing only you but your team, your department, and ideally whole company.

switch007 3y ago
> Homes are full of distractions My office has a loud sales team, a loud sales bell, chairs that nearly touch each other back-to-back, A/C that dries out my throat, people who spend 20 minutes chatting at desks, stupid policies that I can't keep up with (and daily moaning about something in Slack) and lots of viruses. My office has none of that. The biggest distraction is the nice view out of my window. Horses for courses and YMMV All it took was a little discipline not to be tempted to some chores doing the day. Pretty easy to overcome that
- switch007 3y ago
  (Oops, the second "My office" should be "My home office")
Tiktaalik 3y ago
The guy insisting on having an hours long zoom meeting at his desk is actually a lot more distracting than my cat. (I've mentioned to my boss that we should ban zoom meetings at desks and force people to use meeting rooms, but doesn't seem like anyone is listening to me yet)
NeverFade 3y ago
> Homes are full of distractions Offices are even more full of distractions, over which you have far less control. At home, I can designate my own closed office. I have full control. I can remain distraction-free. How does that compare to an open-plan office? People constantly walking and talking around you, many of whom have nothing to do with your job. You simply can't control that. You can't control the noise. You can't control being called into useless meetings or getting pulled into senseless distracting conversations. If you're a senior, you might get pinged multiple times every hour by juniors asking for advice, instead of being able to buffer these interruptions once every hour or two. Hard to buffer requests and questions when they are a tap on the shoulder instead of a message waiting in some inbox.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  >At home, I can designate my own closed office. You conveniently left out the part about some people having the luxurity of personal office. The amount of people I see working on their coach or at kitchen table far out weight the amount of people who actually have a whole room dedicated to their work. I for one don't have extra room just for work, but at least I have dedicated computer table, so I dont have to share the kitchen table or the coffee table.
  - dijit 3y ago
    and you conveniently left out the part where we are: A) Very handsomely paid B) Not as tied to an expensive city (if remote is an option) C) Able to ask our employers to pass on office space savings to us.
    - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
      At least I am not paid enough where I could just buy a bigger apartment with extra room "just because" nor do I live in an expensive city.
      - dijit 3y ago
onion2k 3y ago
Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. Given the choice, every parent I know would choose to work from home with the distraction of their children rather than have to pay something like 25% of their salary on childcare.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  Again American issue.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
People with small children are in the minority. There are plenty that do not have children and others whose children are old enough and independent enough to go about their day without bothering their parents. People are only truly productive in short bursts of say 45 minutes or so. WFH offers more opportunities to take these with your flow rather than disruptions midway. There's also additional factors such as fatigue and stress from commutes, lack of rest time before the next day.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? I sure haven't since I dont bump into people at my home. But that happened often back in the office days. It is not only chasing some personal flow state - having physical presence where you can just talk with people has a lot of not so obvious benefits that no amount of emailing or IM-ing or zooming can fix. I guess it really depends on your team. But with my team 3 our of 8 have multiple young kids constantly disrupting work.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    > How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? Literally never. This has never happened to me. Whereas firing a message into group chat has yielded results all the time, and also effective collaboration on account of we're both at our computers, all the tools are right there, and moving information around precisely is easy. I've also discovered I don't actually hate pair programming, I just hate trying to crowd a workstation when two-way screen sharing is possible and I can throw multiple 4K monitors at the problem. On the other hand I definitely quit the second job I ever had after 2 years because I could not deal with the noise in the open plan office, or someone scratching the hell out of a porcelain bowl with a fork every single day right behind me for what seemed like 1.5 hours.
  - theonlybutlet 3y ago
    Those interactions do occur via phone call or teams chat. The in office ones tended to be procedural, send me a task. Something they in truth knew the answer to anyway. When they actually wanted help, they'd ask me regardless of the format. That's poor etiquette on your team members part, a gentle request from your manager to those offenders should help. No different to someone not answering their phone etc. I do believe a more casual approach to taking calls when WFH is best, but that's just taking advantage. Sometimes young parent's are not self aware in my, perhaps controversial opinion (it's understandable it happens kids take over their lives), but don't take it out on the rest of us.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
It’s a perfectly reasonable question to have asked. Well, of course it’s worse isn’t an answer. Why is it hard to get actual numbers? My companies productivity numbers all went up after WFH (lots of productivity metrics that we track and publish internally). If the numbers are worse can’t google at least say “we measured productivity before/after and it’s worse”. This has become some kind of political thing it seems.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago
  >Why is it hard to get actual numbers? Because we dont have draconian employee tracking. If we had then people would be complaining about that instead.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    What? Am I the only one working in a company that measures measures measures? I would be surprised if you work somewhere that cannot measure production of something that equates to value.
    - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
      Show me a metric you are measuring and I show you a useless gamed metric
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Not so draconian to know if people are in the office or at home.

switch007 3y ago

> Homes are full of distractions My office has a loud sales team, a loud sales bell, chairs that nearly touch each other back-to-back, A/C that dries out my throat, people who spend 20 minutes chatting at desks, stupid policies that I can't keep up with (and daily moaning about something in Slack) and lots of viruses. My office has none of that. The biggest distraction is the nice view out of my window. Horses for courses and YMMV All it took was a little discipline not to be tempted to some chores doing the day. Pretty easy to overcome that

switch007 3y ago
(Oops, the second "My office" should be "My home office")

Tiktaalik 3y ago

The guy insisting on having an hours long zoom meeting at his desk is actually a lot more distracting than my cat. (I've mentioned to my boss that we should ban zoom meetings at desks and force people to use meeting rooms, but doesn't seem like anyone is listening to me yet)

NeverFade 3y ago

> Homes are full of distractions Offices are even more full of distractions, over which you have far less control. At home, I can designate my own closed office. I have full control. I can remain distraction-free. How does that compare to an open-plan office? People constantly walking and talking around you, many of whom have nothing to do with your job. You simply can't control that. You can't control the noise. You can't control being called into useless meetings or getting pulled into senseless distracting conversations. If you're a senior, you might get pinged multiple times every hour by juniors asking for advice, instead of being able to buffer these interruptions once every hour or two. Hard to buffer requests and questions when they are a tap on the shoulder instead of a message waiting in some inbox.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
>At home, I can designate my own closed office. You conveniently left out the part about some people having the luxurity of personal office. The amount of people I see working on their coach or at kitchen table far out weight the amount of people who actually have a whole room dedicated to their work. I for one don't have extra room just for work, but at least I have dedicated computer table, so I dont have to share the kitchen table or the coffee table.
- dijit 3y ago
  and you conveniently left out the part where we are: A) Very handsomely paid B) Not as tied to an expensive city (if remote is an option) C) Able to ask our employers to pass on office space savings to us.
  - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
    At least I am not paid enough where I could just buy a bigger apartment with extra room "just because" nor do I live in an expensive city.
    - dijit 3y ago

onion2k 3y ago

Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. Given the choice, every parent I know would choose to work from home with the distraction of their children rather than have to pay something like 25% of their salary on childcare.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
Again American issue.

theonlybutlet 3y ago

People with small children are in the minority. There are plenty that do not have children and others whose children are old enough and independent enough to go about their day without bothering their parents. People are only truly productive in short bursts of say 45 minutes or so. WFH offers more opportunities to take these with your flow rather than disruptions midway. There's also additional factors such as fatigue and stress from commutes, lack of rest time before the next day.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? I sure haven't since I dont bump into people at my home. But that happened often back in the office days. It is not only chasing some personal flow state - having physical presence where you can just talk with people has a lot of not so obvious benefits that no amount of emailing or IM-ing or zooming can fix. I guess it really depends on your team. But with my team 3 our of 8 have multiple young kids constantly disrupting work.
- XorNot 3y ago
  > How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? Literally never. This has never happened to me. Whereas firing a message into group chat has yielded results all the time, and also effective collaboration on account of we're both at our computers, all the tools are right there, and moving information around precisely is easy. I've also discovered I don't actually hate pair programming, I just hate trying to crowd a workstation when two-way screen sharing is possible and I can throw multiple 4K monitors at the problem. On the other hand I definitely quit the second job I ever had after 2 years because I could not deal with the noise in the open plan office, or someone scratching the hell out of a porcelain bowl with a fork every single day right behind me for what seemed like 1.5 hours.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  Those interactions do occur via phone call or teams chat. The in office ones tended to be procedural, send me a task. Something they in truth knew the answer to anyway. When they actually wanted help, they'd ask me regardless of the format. That's poor etiquette on your team members part, a gentle request from your manager to those offenders should help. No different to someone not answering their phone etc. I do believe a more casual approach to taking calls when WFH is best, but that's just taking advantage. Sometimes young parent's are not self aware in my, perhaps controversial opinion (it's understandable it happens kids take over their lives), but don't take it out on the rest of us.

lll-o-lll 3y ago

It’s a perfectly reasonable question to have asked. Well, of course it’s worse isn’t an answer. Why is it hard to get actual numbers? My companies productivity numbers all went up after WFH (lots of productivity metrics that we track and publish internally). If the numbers are worse can’t google at least say “we measured productivity before/after and it’s worse”. This has become some kind of political thing it seems.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago
>Why is it hard to get actual numbers? Because we dont have draconian employee tracking. If we had then people would be complaining about that instead.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  What? Am I the only one working in a company that measures measures measures? I would be surprised if you work somewhere that cannot measure production of something that equates to value.
  - nextlevelwizard 3y ago
    Show me a metric you are measuring and I show you a useless gamed metric
- bombolo 3y ago
  Not so draconian to know if people are in the office or at home.