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> It's not about productivity at all. > WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlig

> It's not about productivity at all. > WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.

imcrs 11mo ago
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management. Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM? If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
- lukas099 11mo ago
  I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
  - p_l 11mo ago
    The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work. You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
    - jeena 11mo ago
      This is exactly my experience too.
  - rustystump 11mo ago
    Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote. Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
    - Terretta 11mo ago
      > Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. Or doors. 25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door". In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track. The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ... Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters. // See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/ https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
- legostormtroopr 11mo ago
  I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm. But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time. As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job. If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
  - imcrs 11mo ago
    Do you pay your programmers hourly or on salary?
  - agubelu 11mo ago
    How do you measure whether some output corresponds to 8 hours of work, and not 4 or 16 hours?
    - jakupovic 11mo ago
      He doesn't known what he is talking about. Bunch of wannabe founders waxing BS. If you want 8 hours of guaranteed output use a bot
  - rustystump 11mo ago
    8 hours of output? I get it but poor phrasing.
  - croon 11mo ago
    To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell. I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
- moscoe 11mo ago
  I’m sorry management hurt you. It’s not your fault.
  - imcrs 11mo ago
    To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here. Like everything it's a mix. In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
    - a96 11mo ago
      Because they're essentially always dictations, not discussions.
- safety1st 11mo ago
  In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management." And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated. So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
  - messe 11mo ago
    And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
    - dkga 11mo ago
      It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
      - jakupovic 11mo ago
        Yup, short walt to my colleagues who are all spread across the world. /$
      - jeena 11mo ago
        Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.
      - himinlomax 11mo ago
eastbound 11mo ago
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative. I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
- saagarjha 11mo ago
  You do know there are several productive companies that are entirely remote, right?
  - eastbound 11mo ago
    Instagram ragequits remote working. Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years. Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums. Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
    - wredcoll 11mo ago
      I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!
    - duskdozer 11mo ago
      >offering to double the salary in case of success have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill >sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work? >in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich. not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
array_key_first 11mo ago
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers. For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably. If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  true for many creative and intellectual jobs too.
- JamesBarney 11mo ago
  It's definitely not more productive per hour than 40. And if you're moonlighting another 30 hrs that'll definitely decrease your productivity at work.
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows. And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute. An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it. Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.

imcrs 11mo ago

I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management. Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM? If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.

lukas099 11mo ago
I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
- p_l 11mo ago
  The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work. You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
  - jeena 11mo ago
    This is exactly my experience too.
- rustystump 11mo ago
  Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote. Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
  - Terretta 11mo ago
    > Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. Or doors. 25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door". In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track. The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ... Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters. // See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/ https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
legostormtroopr 11mo ago
I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm. But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time. As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job. If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
- imcrs 11mo ago
  Do you pay your programmers hourly or on salary?
- agubelu 11mo ago
  How do you measure whether some output corresponds to 8 hours of work, and not 4 or 16 hours?
  - jakupovic 11mo ago
    He doesn't known what he is talking about. Bunch of wannabe founders waxing BS. If you want 8 hours of guaranteed output use a bot
- rustystump 11mo ago
  8 hours of output? I get it but poor phrasing.
- croon 11mo ago
  To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell. I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
moscoe 11mo ago
I’m sorry management hurt you. It’s not your fault.
- imcrs 11mo ago
  To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here. Like everything it's a mix. In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
  - a96 11mo ago
    Because they're essentially always dictations, not discussions.
safety1st 11mo ago
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management." And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated. So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
- messe 11mo ago
  And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
  - dkga 11mo ago
    It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
    - jakupovic 11mo ago
      Yup, short walt to my colleagues who are all spread across the world. /$
    - jeena 11mo ago
      Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.
    - himinlomax 11mo ago

eastbound 11mo ago

I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative. I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.

saagarjha 11mo ago
You do know there are several productive companies that are entirely remote, right?
- eastbound 11mo ago
  Instagram ragequits remote working. Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years. Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums. Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
  - wredcoll 11mo ago
    I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!
  - duskdozer 11mo ago
    >offering to double the salary in case of success have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill >sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work? >in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich. not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?

array_key_first 11mo ago

I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers. For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably. If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.

red-iron-pine 11mo ago
true for many creative and intellectual jobs too.
JamesBarney 11mo ago
It's definitely not more productive per hour than 40. And if you're moonlighting another 30 hrs that'll definitely decrease your productivity at work.
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows. And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute. An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it. Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.