6 ms·

Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)

207 points by delichon 11mo ago

ilc 11mo ago
To Quote the Page: Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics I'd wait for the revision.
- Clent 11mo ago
  It's quite telling that this is nothing more than an abstract but it has gained votes so fast it hit the top link.
  - delichon 11mo ago
    The abstract page has a link to the whole paper as a PDF: https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum5926/files/pallais/files/power_of_proximity_nov2023.pdf https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
dickiedyce 11mo ago
1 company? 2 buildings? Over < 5 years? Any evidence for "dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run" must be pretty sketchy.
jacquesm 11mo ago
Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further. There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse. @Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?" full text: https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum5926/files/pallais/files/power_of_proximity_nov2023.pdf https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
- noobermin 11mo ago
  The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons. The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
    - delichon 11mo ago
      I thought that the title drops the lede so I abreviated the second sentence of the abstract: We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.
      - ghaff 11mo ago
        Which seems very consistent with everything I've seen over a fairly long career. I'd add not just co-workers but also other interactions with industry peers.
      - jacquesm 11mo ago
        That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality. It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity: "We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. " So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research. For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.
b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago
how convenient for Meta. And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"
- ilc 11mo ago
  Thanks. :) And yeah, I skimmed it. I stand by my comment.
afavour 11mo ago
Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship... All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
talkingtab 11mo ago
The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?
- throw10920 11mo ago
  It's probably pretty close to the Allen Curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve
  - jbn 11mo ago
    This topic definately resonates with Thomas Allen's Managing the flow of technology (he was a great prof and all-around nice human being).
- micromacrofoot 11mo ago
  It's in the study, generally it's sitting close enough to converse they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
- candiddevmike 11mo ago
  Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Nothing makes me write code better than desk lunch mouth noises. Oh, and that one guy who has an annoying, noisy habit he's in denial about.
robinhouston 11mo ago
From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_: > Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. > Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
- bluedino 11mo ago
  > I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
  - ambicapter 11mo ago
    You're basically restating exactly what he's saying.
  - riskable 11mo ago
    According to most big companies these days, "lone coder" is the peak of business efficiency!
    - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
      It is. If you have defined end goal. But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved. day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work
mdrzn 11mo ago
(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review. Why is this here in the first page?
jmyeet 11mo ago
It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility. And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer). Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth. Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs. [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
- stuffn 11mo ago
  If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.
  - wil421 11mo ago
    I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.
  - gdulli 11mo ago
    If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.
angiolillo 11mo ago
Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2]. If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore. A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that. [1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
- AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..." On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
  - theshrike79 11mo ago
    Peopleware[0] taught us this in 1987 already. It's not complicated how teams should be located physically, but corporations refuse to learn and try to reinvent something every time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
runako 11mo ago
This is fascinating, and possibly relevant to companies that hire for the long term. Unfortunately, that excludes most of corporate America.
- riskable 11mo ago
  In the current business environment, employees aren't people they're "jobs". As long as they're treated as "jobs" why do you care where they sit as long as "the job" gets done? In fact, you shouldn't care WTF they're doing at all as long as "the job" gets done! Money goes in and work gets done. Simple, right? Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".
diogenescynic 11mo ago
What about all the time spent commuting? For all the drawbacks of working remotely, the amount of time/energy saved not commuting has to be the most significant. I get more 'focus time' where I can deeply concentrate when I work from home. If I have a commute, I feel frazzled and drained by the time I even step foot in the office.
- parliament32 11mo ago
  I don't really understand why the commute always comes up as an argument in the WFH/RTO slapfights. How is your commute anyone's fault but your own? Could you not choose to live walking distance from work? Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid? If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute?
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    >How is your commute anyone's fault but your own? I generally can't control housing prices, and whenever I suggest building more, the ire of the entire landed gentry class is directed into a singularity centered on my forehead. >Could you not choose to live walking distance from work? With housing prices being insane? No. There are like 12 different policy failures that make it impossible to live much closer to work than people already do, and it's only getting worse as rural America hollows out and people move to cities where there are amenities, like cafes and hospitals. >Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid? Because these companies said we could? Why are you so quick to blame employees who would be destitute without a job, whereas these behemoth companies could fire everyone and just do nothing with their capital for ten years and be fine? People are just trying to get by and survive, and you're blaming them? >If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute? Sure, I'll just get the magic "property price go down" wand.
  - diogenescynic 11mo ago
    That's all besides the point I am making... All things being equal, why is remote work not better for the employer as well as employee? Less commute=more energy and better focus=increased efficiency (I get much more work done at home than in an office). At the same time the employer doesn't need to provide as much real estate space, so it's not only more efficient, but cheaper. The only advantage seems to be control/authority? In what way is having employees in office preferable. Most of my meetings are with teams that are geographically dispersed anyways. Is it really any more effective to take a Zoom call in an office vs at my desk at home?
lenerdenator 11mo ago
I will say this: as a person with ADHD, I, personally, am more productive in the office than I am at home. When I was hybrid, I'd go to the local library to work. That also helped. It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute. If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.
- codr7 11mo ago
  Libraries or cafés for me, I need some kind of outer stimuli to keep me going. Most offices unfortunately drain my will to live real fast. Maybe if we tried to build offices what people enjoy spending time in...
- wil421 11mo ago
  I’m the opposite too much noise and commotion in the office. Lots of people to talk to and others that stop by. WFH was much more efficient for me, even with distractions like interesting things at home and wife/kids.
  - lenerdenator 11mo ago
    See, I do remember that when I was in the office pre-COVID. It was annoying. The thing is, though, is most days, it's just me and my manager working at the office. Pretty much all of my teammates are in India, or are somewhere else in the US/CAN. We do have an intern but he's not here most days. As a result, it's basically me driving to the office to host meetings with people who, unless they buy plane tickets, cannot come by my desk to bother me. So I've got that part of it going for me, which is nice.
- rcpt 11mo ago
  I've been remote for 5 years at faang. It's ridiculous they haven't fired me yet. The productivity hit from remote work is huge. For self-contained coding exercises remote is fine. AI does all that now but I guess I still need to prompt it. Getting myself impactful projects, winning turf wars, new collaboration with a cousin team? Forget it. Impossible from home.
maerF0x0 11mo ago
> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office. Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
- warkdarrior 11mo ago
  Off-the-shelf AI can replace workers in their twenties and AI fine-tuned over a few months for your company's needs can replace workers in their forties. Problem solved!
theideaofcoffee 11mo ago
That's great for whoever wants this to justify their fearful, uninspired, fashion-driven back to office policies, love that for them, I hope you get the company you deserve. I also hope all of your best people (read: most expensive) leave, because aren't these dumb decisions always done to prod people into leaving without paying out severance? See also: fiefdom-building by cowardly managers, "leaders" who hate their home life, etc. I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.
JamesBarney 11mo ago
This work would suggest that the WFH movement would see a rise in sr. engineer salaries and a reduction in jr. engineers salaries, which we haven't seen.
- throw-the-towel 11mo ago
  Does the industry even have as much junior folks as it used to? Because cutting them, or not hiring them in the first place, is an alternative to lowering their salaries.
bradly 11mo ago
One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter. [0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
- _ea1k 11mo ago
  This sounds like what PI planning is imagined to be in "safe".
bradfa 11mo ago
I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas. Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen. Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give. All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
- sureglymop 11mo ago
  Not to simplify too much, but I think it comes down to accountability and responsibility. I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that. I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.
stego-tech 11mo ago
This all vibes with what I observed during the pandemic myself, also in a Fortune 500 SV enterprise: * Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree. * Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills. * The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence. My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.
deleted 11mo ago
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apercu 11mo ago
Huh. Well, what's the average tenure at a company now? Bureau of Labor Stats says: As of January 2024, the median tenure for all U.S. wage-and-salary workers was 3.9 years. So that means we should all be working remotely, if productivity was the actual thing the capital & management classes were trying to solve. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current-employer-was-3-9-years-in-january-2024.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current...
boh 11mo ago
During COVID, studies supporting working from home leading to higher productivity were highlighted. Now when companies want people to come back, studies supporting working in an office producing higher productivity are highlighted. Funny how that works and this post is already 100+ points. *cant wait to see those down votes for this comment
- sc68cal 11mo ago
  It's called consent manufacturing
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  Kind of wild that people don't just do both. Let your reports who want to sit in traffic commute to the office, and let the ones who don't want to do that work from home. Problem freakin' solved. Where's my Nobel prize?
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
If an alien was reading many of the comments here, before they knew much about the world, they’d probably first believe that working from office is this new fangled idea that had never existed before. Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc. Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way. This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.
- lnsru 11mo ago
  The thing is that office can be very different environment. I have my own office at current workplace. But I was sitting in 20 seat open office too. People were hiding in the toilets to do some coding…
wrxd 11mo ago
So, when are we forbidding teams to have members in different offices? I must have also missed the email telling everything about the re-org so that teams will only need to work with other teams in their proximity
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  I used to work for a company that was so vehemently against remote work, except we had three different offices (a main and two satellites). My boss and I never lived in the same state during my entire tenure. Somehow, we managed just fine, even if we were both forced to sit in traffic every day, just so we could... video chat from an expensive office building. (Of course, we had to justify some very expensive remodels, too... but I'm sure that's just a coinkydink.)
exabrial 11mo ago
Precisely why we do: * No Mail Mondays. Engineers are deep in the code and are not disturbed other than the on-call. Engineers are expected to have a stack of work they can make the progress on if they get stuck. These days are in-office. * Work from Home Wed: Coordinated work from home day. This forces everyone to be available online, and nobody is missing in-person meetings. Response times expected to be quick in slack. While not perfect, and we do have some employees that struggle with output on WFH days, this is far more productive than 5 straight days in office.
- hephaes7us 11mo ago
  I like this kind of thinking. I wonder though if you're paying as much attention to see who's "struggling with output" on Tues, Thurs, and Fri? As in, are you skeptical of WFH and looking for downsides, or does your particular team just work better with more time in the office? I only ask because it's foreign to me; offices completely destroy my focus and I don't know how anyone does it.
indycliff 11mo ago
Currently sitting in an open office floor plan surrounded by 4 other developers less than 3 feet away speaking in Hindi. I don't speak Hindi. There are constraints to this open door distraction.
alikimovich 11mo ago
From personal experience after working 4 years remotely, I started going to the office three days a week, and while efficiency per day is definitely smaller, we achieve much better results much faster, just because we can solve a lot of problems just where we are, without scheduling meetings or waiting for people to answer. Not to mention how much more I personally learn from my colleagues.

207 points by delichon 11mo ago

ilc 11mo ago

To Quote the Page: Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics I'd wait for the revision.

Clent 11mo ago
It's quite telling that this is nothing more than an abstract but it has gained votes so fast it hit the top link.
- delichon 11mo ago
  The abstract page has a link to the whole paper as a PDF: https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum5926/files/pallais/files/power_of_proximity_nov2023.pdf https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...

dickiedyce 11mo ago

1 company? 2 buildings? Over < 5 years? Any evidence for "dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run" must be pretty sketchy.

jacquesm 11mo ago

Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further. There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse. @Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?" full text: https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum5926/files/pallais/files/power_of_proximity_nov2023.pdf https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...

noobermin 11mo ago
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons. The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
  - delichon 11mo ago
    I thought that the title drops the lede so I abreviated the second sentence of the abstract: We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.
    - ghaff 11mo ago
      Which seems very consistent with everything I've seen over a fairly long career. I'd add not just co-workers but also other interactions with industry peers.
    - jacquesm 11mo ago
      That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality. It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity: "We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. " So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research. For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.

b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago

how convenient for Meta. And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"

ilc 11mo ago
Thanks. :) And yeah, I skimmed it. I stand by my comment.

afavour 11mo ago

Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship... All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.

talkingtab 11mo ago

The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?

throw10920 11mo ago
It's probably pretty close to the Allen Curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve
- jbn 11mo ago
  This topic definately resonates with Thomas Allen's Managing the flow of technology (he was a great prof and all-around nice human being).
micromacrofoot 11mo ago
It's in the study, generally it's sitting close enough to converse they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
candiddevmike 11mo ago
Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  Nothing makes me write code better than desk lunch mouth noises. Oh, and that one guy who has an annoying, noisy habit he's in denial about.

robinhouston 11mo ago

From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_: > Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. > Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.

bluedino 11mo ago
> I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
- ambicapter 11mo ago
  You're basically restating exactly what he's saying.
- riskable 11mo ago
  According to most big companies these days, "lone coder" is the peak of business efficiency!
  - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
    It is. If you have defined end goal. But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved. day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work

mdrzn 11mo ago

(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review. Why is this here in the first page?

jmyeet 11mo ago

It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility. And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer). Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth. Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs. [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

stuffn 11mo ago
If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.
- wil421 11mo ago
  I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.
- gdulli 11mo ago
  If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.

angiolillo 11mo ago

Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2]. If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore. A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that. [1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)

AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..." On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
- theshrike79 11mo ago
  Peopleware[0] taught us this in 1987 already. It's not complicated how teams should be located physically, but corporations refuse to learn and try to reinvent something every time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

runako 11mo ago

This is fascinating, and possibly relevant to companies that hire for the long term. Unfortunately, that excludes most of corporate America.

riskable 11mo ago
In the current business environment, employees aren't people they're "jobs". As long as they're treated as "jobs" why do you care where they sit as long as "the job" gets done? In fact, you shouldn't care WTF they're doing at all as long as "the job" gets done! Money goes in and work gets done. Simple, right? Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".

diogenescynic 11mo ago

What about all the time spent commuting? For all the drawbacks of working remotely, the amount of time/energy saved not commuting has to be the most significant. I get more 'focus time' where I can deeply concentrate when I work from home. If I have a commute, I feel frazzled and drained by the time I even step foot in the office.

parliament32 11mo ago
I don't really understand why the commute always comes up as an argument in the WFH/RTO slapfights. How is your commute anyone's fault but your own? Could you not choose to live walking distance from work? Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid? If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute?
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  >How is your commute anyone's fault but your own? I generally can't control housing prices, and whenever I suggest building more, the ire of the entire landed gentry class is directed into a singularity centered on my forehead. >Could you not choose to live walking distance from work? With housing prices being insane? No. There are like 12 different policy failures that make it impossible to live much closer to work than people already do, and it's only getting worse as rural America hollows out and people move to cities where there are amenities, like cafes and hospitals. >Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid? Because these companies said we could? Why are you so quick to blame employees who would be destitute without a job, whereas these behemoth companies could fire everyone and just do nothing with their capital for ten years and be fine? People are just trying to get by and survive, and you're blaming them? >If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute? Sure, I'll just get the magic "property price go down" wand.
- diogenescynic 11mo ago
  That's all besides the point I am making... All things being equal, why is remote work not better for the employer as well as employee? Less commute=more energy and better focus=increased efficiency (I get much more work done at home than in an office). At the same time the employer doesn't need to provide as much real estate space, so it's not only more efficient, but cheaper. The only advantage seems to be control/authority? In what way is having employees in office preferable. Most of my meetings are with teams that are geographically dispersed anyways. Is it really any more effective to take a Zoom call in an office vs at my desk at home?

lenerdenator 11mo ago

I will say this: as a person with ADHD, I, personally, am more productive in the office than I am at home. When I was hybrid, I'd go to the local library to work. That also helped. It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute. If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.

codr7 11mo ago
Libraries or cafés for me, I need some kind of outer stimuli to keep me going. Most offices unfortunately drain my will to live real fast. Maybe if we tried to build offices what people enjoy spending time in...
wil421 11mo ago
I’m the opposite too much noise and commotion in the office. Lots of people to talk to and others that stop by. WFH was much more efficient for me, even with distractions like interesting things at home and wife/kids.
- lenerdenator 11mo ago
  See, I do remember that when I was in the office pre-COVID. It was annoying. The thing is, though, is most days, it's just me and my manager working at the office. Pretty much all of my teammates are in India, or are somewhere else in the US/CAN. We do have an intern but he's not here most days. As a result, it's basically me driving to the office to host meetings with people who, unless they buy plane tickets, cannot come by my desk to bother me. So I've got that part of it going for me, which is nice.
rcpt 11mo ago
I've been remote for 5 years at faang. It's ridiculous they haven't fired me yet. The productivity hit from remote work is huge. For self-contained coding exercises remote is fine. AI does all that now but I guess I still need to prompt it. Getting myself impactful projects, winning turf wars, new collaboration with a cousin team? Forget it. Impossible from home.

maerF0x0 11mo ago

> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office. Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"

warkdarrior 11mo ago
Off-the-shelf AI can replace workers in their twenties and AI fine-tuned over a few months for your company's needs can replace workers in their forties. Problem solved!

theideaofcoffee 11mo ago

That's great for whoever wants this to justify their fearful, uninspired, fashion-driven back to office policies, love that for them, I hope you get the company you deserve. I also hope all of your best people (read: most expensive) leave, because aren't these dumb decisions always done to prod people into leaving without paying out severance? See also: fiefdom-building by cowardly managers, "leaders" who hate their home life, etc. I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.

JamesBarney 11mo ago

This work would suggest that the WFH movement would see a rise in sr. engineer salaries and a reduction in jr. engineers salaries, which we haven't seen.

throw-the-towel 11mo ago
Does the industry even have as much junior folks as it used to? Because cutting them, or not hiring them in the first place, is an alternative to lowering their salaries.

bradly 11mo ago

One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter. [0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday

_ea1k 11mo ago
This sounds like what PI planning is imagined to be in "safe".

bradfa 11mo ago

I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas. Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen. Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give. All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.

sureglymop 11mo ago
Not to simplify too much, but I think it comes down to accountability and responsibility. I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that. I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.

stego-tech 11mo ago

This all vibes with what I observed during the pandemic myself, also in a Fortune 500 SV enterprise: * Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree. * Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills. * The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence. My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.

deleted 11mo ago

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apercu 11mo ago

Huh. Well, what's the average tenure at a company now? Bureau of Labor Stats says: As of January 2024, the median tenure for all U.S. wage-and-salary workers was 3.9 years. So that means we should all be working remotely, if productivity was the actual thing the capital & management classes were trying to solve. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current-employer-was-3-9-years-in-january-2024.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current...

boh 11mo ago

During COVID, studies supporting working from home leading to higher productivity were highlighted. Now when companies want people to come back, studies supporting working in an office producing higher productivity are highlighted. Funny how that works and this post is already 100+ points. *cant wait to see those down votes for this comment

sc68cal 11mo ago
It's called consent manufacturing
venturecruelty 11mo ago
Kind of wild that people don't just do both. Let your reports who want to sit in traffic commute to the office, and let the ones who don't want to do that work from home. Problem freakin' solved. Where's my Nobel prize?

hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago

If an alien was reading many of the comments here, before they knew much about the world, they’d probably first believe that working from office is this new fangled idea that had never existed before. Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc. Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way. This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.

lnsru 11mo ago
The thing is that office can be very different environment. I have my own office at current workplace. But I was sitting in 20 seat open office too. People were hiding in the toilets to do some coding…

wrxd 11mo ago

So, when are we forbidding teams to have members in different offices? I must have also missed the email telling everything about the re-org so that teams will only need to work with other teams in their proximity

venturecruelty 11mo ago
I used to work for a company that was so vehemently against remote work, except we had three different offices (a main and two satellites). My boss and I never lived in the same state during my entire tenure. Somehow, we managed just fine, even if we were both forced to sit in traffic every day, just so we could... video chat from an expensive office building. (Of course, we had to justify some very expensive remodels, too... but I'm sure that's just a coinkydink.)

exabrial 11mo ago

Precisely why we do: * No Mail Mondays. Engineers are deep in the code and are not disturbed other than the on-call. Engineers are expected to have a stack of work they can make the progress on if they get stuck. These days are in-office. * Work from Home Wed: Coordinated work from home day. This forces everyone to be available online, and nobody is missing in-person meetings. Response times expected to be quick in slack. While not perfect, and we do have some employees that struggle with output on WFH days, this is far more productive than 5 straight days in office.

hephaes7us 11mo ago
I like this kind of thinking. I wonder though if you're paying as much attention to see who's "struggling with output" on Tues, Thurs, and Fri? As in, are you skeptical of WFH and looking for downsides, or does your particular team just work better with more time in the office? I only ask because it's foreign to me; offices completely destroy my focus and I don't know how anyone does it.

indycliff 11mo ago

Currently sitting in an open office floor plan surrounded by 4 other developers less than 3 feet away speaking in Hindi. I don't speak Hindi. There are constraints to this open door distraction.

alikimovich 11mo ago

From personal experience after working 4 years remotely, I started going to the office three days a week, and while efficiency per day is definitely smaller, we achieve much better results much faster, just because we can solve a lot of problems just where we are, without scheduling meetings or waiting for people to answer. Not to mention how much more I personally learn from my colleagues.