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I’m a little suprised that Richard Hamming doesn’t come up in this conversation. He’s a mathmetician who noticed from working in research at many different loca

I’m a little suprised that Richard Hamming doesn’t come up in this conversation. He’s a mathmetician who noticed from working in research at many different locations that there were 2 kinds of people, those who worked with their doors open vs those who worked with their doors closed. The closed were considerably more productive in the short term. In the long term they were largely irrelevant to their field. I’m wondering if WFH is analogous to working with your door closed. It’s much harder to be distracted by colleagues who might be be bringing course correcting information about your field. It’s the main reason I like working in offices, the random encounters that seem impossible remote. I have a suspicion that onsite companies may move slower but have better acceleration all things being equal. But, if you can’t attract talent, which this article suggests, that might be a bigger problem to overcome, and I don’t know which has a bigger effect.

Gigachad 3y ago
Yeah I get the feeling that the “I’m so productive now that I’m not being interrupted by coworkers” is basically “we don’t communicate with each other anymore”
- aurareturn 3y ago
  I'm also feeling this. I think my experience with remote work is that I can be more productive on a personal level, but I do feel like it's much harder to course correct the team if the overall goal is wrong. For example, while I can knock out more tickets personally, it won't matter if the entire project is the wrong project and I can't influence people enough to change it remotely. I have a sense that things like coding can be done more productively remotely. But everything else leading up to the code part is worse remotely. This includes talking to customers, negotiating with other teams, iterating through designs with the team, selling the idea to executives, and onboarding new customers. The actual writing code part can be done just as effectively remotely. And that part is what most of Hacker News user base does. Therefore, I feel that a lot of pro-WFH people on HN don't actually understand why companies are adamant about RTO. They can't see the overall picture - only their small part - so they conclude that there must be some conspiracy theory like commercial real estate investments driving RTO.

Gigachad 3y ago

Yeah I get the feeling that the “I’m so productive now that I’m not being interrupted by coworkers” is basically “we don’t communicate with each other anymore”

aurareturn 3y ago
I'm also feeling this. I think my experience with remote work is that I can be more productive on a personal level, but I do feel like it's much harder to course correct the team if the overall goal is wrong. For example, while I can knock out more tickets personally, it won't matter if the entire project is the wrong project and I can't influence people enough to change it remotely. I have a sense that things like coding can be done more productively remotely. But everything else leading up to the code part is worse remotely. This includes talking to customers, negotiating with other teams, iterating through designs with the team, selling the idea to executives, and onboarding new customers. The actual writing code part can be done just as effectively remotely. And that part is what most of Hacker News user base does. Therefore, I feel that a lot of pro-WFH people on HN don't actually understand why companies are adamant about RTO. They can't see the overall picture - only their small part - so they conclude that there must be some conspiracy theory like commercial real estate investments driving RTO.