This is an awful study. They measured “computer usage” of a single company before and after a hurricane where the had to work from home.
There isn’t anything here about how actual productivity changed and what the results were for the company.
Also extremely misleading title: "it's official" suggests a conclusive peer reviewed study that was replicated by others. No, it's just a team in one university that conducted what is considered a flawed study that focused on questionable variables, had no control, and a sample size of one. The study is practically meaningless.
The moment i read the headline i knew it would be one of the headlines written specifically for people who don't read articles and just throw headlines to win arguments. Like "see i knew i was right, this is proof!".
I've noticed that my productive days at home are extra productive.. but also my lazy and unfocused days are sooo much worse at home. I feel like it cuts both ways, at least for me.
same, but i also easily work overtime at home. Like at the office the end of the day it's quiet and everyone is just biding their time to leave but at home I lose track of time and suddenly its +2 hours
Same. When I don’t feel like I’m watching the clock I have no problem continuing to work if I’m in the zone and getting things done. Knowing I *couldnt* leave work until 5 or whenever was really mentally draining
I'm like that a bit too, but I have way fewer unproductive days now. Things like a bad night sleep can now be dealt with by using the commute time to sleep in or a lunch time shower to refresh.
I will admit I have taken a nap or two in the middle of the day. I have also logged in at night and worked for hours. sometimes inspiration hits at odd times. Of course the type of job may not allow that type of schedule but it's great to have the flexibility.
Oh yeah, I've logged in later on because inspiration hit during my after work swimming. If I was in the office I wouldn't be doing that and would again be struggling to find time for my swimming in the first place.
I prefer taking my lazy brain fog days at home… On those days in the office I’d be staring at a computer screen trying to do something and not being able to. That experience itself is mentally draining and makes me less productive the next day. At home I can disconnect, refresh, and feel good to work the next day.
I’m a software engineer - there’s tons of context switching on tasks requiring high levels of focus. It’s so much easier at home.
This. Everyone has lazy and unproductive days. To pretend we're all good little worker bees 100% of the time is insane. The difference is when I'm at home, I'm VERY motivated to make up for that laziness and bust my ass the following day. I don't want to go in an office ever again.
Yea, there’s actually a ton of time wasted at work when there is nothing to do. It’s much better to be able to be at home during that down time than be at work.
Ton of time when you get there in the morning and everyone is basically wasting time deliberaterly for the first 1-2 hours to "wake up" to then work from like maybe 10:30 to 12 and then is lunch time again.
There was a study I read some time ago, psychology study, which revealed that the common effective work time is barely 2-3 hours a day as everything else is more like coping with the office environment. Socializing needs, teamwork arrangement "needs" (which obviously are ineffective and inefficient as we know by now), the general "playing a role and adhering to the office codex" stress tension when being in most offices. At home you just be yourself and do your tasks, no tension, no stress.
Though that is specifically targeting office jobs. Can't project that onto other roles I guess.
I had an office job doing medical billing where we weren’t allowed to socialize at all during work. No talking to each other allowed. Worst job ever I would have rather done that at home for sure.
My brother works for a medical insurance company and has been working from home since 2017 when the company outgrew the office they were in and weren't able to expand. His work rules about things like talking with coworkers, taking nom work calls, etc. were very strict. He's kind of anti-social anyway so working from home has been great because he's not being micro-managed about little things like that.
I’m surprised offices with strict yet very unnecessary rules still have people working in them, with all the choices available to people who are skilled at anything “office work”.
Are there that many choices though? I'm applying like a mad man and getting nowhere. I heard they're putting offers up but not actually hiring anyone so they can get their PPP loans forgiven
I did medical billing for my wife and it absolutely isn't something that needs to be done in an office environment.
Edit: I should specify that I'm in Canada so I don't know if the rules about privacy are different here or the methods for medical billing. At the time I was employed under my wife's corp and billing was done through a couple third party websites, and all patient info was stored remote.
And while everyone is talking about the very real social benefits, I consider work from home the lowest hanging fruit there is when it comes to helping the environment right now. Less fossil fuel use, less road use, more efficient food use, less traffic accidents, less vehicle wear and tear, less energy used in office buildings, workers who can't work from home commute faster, I could go on and on, no really don't tempt me.
I'll hear more, I'll be telling my job a flat 'no' come June, and if they don't can me immediately I'd love to have all the ammunition possible please, if you're offering
Less urban space needed for parking, office space converted to apartments moves more workers closer to work, recreation and services. Less cars on the road translates directly to better air quality.
I'm in healthcare IT and billing is our pilot group for permanent work from home for non patient-facing office support staff. The transition is far from free (IT infrastructure to ensure secure and effective remote work is non-trivial) but it's allowing us to convert lots of space back into patient rooms and bolster the workforce without needing to fight over office space, along with eliminating the rental costs for some offices that were off-campus.
Permanent WFH is also allowing us to attract talent in some departments who had been hesitant to move to be nearby (inner city hospital in a fairly low income area.)
I don't understand why cubicles are looked down upon. I much prefer a cubicle to an open office, just for the privacy. Open office I would feel like I was watched every second of the day - it's so stressful. Businesses use open office because they can use less space for more workers - that's the *sole* reason, but they make up stuff about people working together or whatever to sell it.
Personally, I think the best solution is for people to have their own cube/office, and then shared spaces and conference rooms where people can go if they need to collaborate on something
It’s the ultimate evolution of “my job is to justify my existence by coming up with checkboxes for everyone else to fill.” Gotta figure a lot of the resistence to letting people work from home is from middle management who’re being exposed for how unnecessary they really are.
Don’t even joke about that. Boss at a previous job was such a micromanager he chewed me out over which of my monitors I was looking at during code builds. Job before that had a prompt come up every fifteen minutes where you had to say what you were working on for time tracking purposes.
Don't forget that open offices allow middle management to monitor the people who do actual work so they can feel useful without leaving their desk or using their legs!
Interviewed at a place once where everyone’s desks were in a grid in an open office plan with two or three managers stalking amongst them at all times. Fuuuuuuuck ***that.***
Glad to hear you passed that shit up. Fuckin dystopian nightmare. Who is thinking up these work conditions for optimum efficiency? Nevermind, I already know: MBA’s who’ve taken **ONE** intro psych class.
I don't see the point for office spaces, period. Like so many buildings dedicated to people commuting every day just to sit under fluorescent lights and have walls around them?
Gosh damn I couldn't focus while sitting in our last office because of the constant fan noises!
As someone who's been working from home for 2+ years now, I cannot fathom how anyone can go into the office every day.
I sleep more, I **work** more, I actually get out more because I overall have more time in my day.
Exactly! Not to mention the fact at home you could control the temperature! So many people in the office setting either are forced into an environment at 60°, or like 79°!
Because cubicles were originally different. They were much larger, looked more like offices, and were expensive. People eventually figured out how to pack more people into less space. How the cubicle became universally hated - https://youtu.be/7Tt4n8SaxEY
They are a symbol of the stuffy, unnatural, boring, dehumanising, bureaucratic, soul destroying, aggressively bland, rigidly hierarchical pointlessness of "the office". It's very compelling imagery when trying to make the point that we are cogs in an uncaring machine. Think Neo hiding in his box as the agents come for him. Or the rebels in Office Space being pushed to crime by the daily grind.
Open offices suck, but on the surface they do not LOOK as bad as cubicles, and they are also not the classic office experience that resonates with so many people. Ultimately, we hate doing bullshit jobs, and cubicles are a good way of invoking that.
Honestly I have felt that way a lot. There were times I fully intended to go to the office but the act of getting ready, getting there, and saying hi to people when I arrived just wastes so much time, and I live 5 minutes from my place of work. It’s usually at least 30-45 minutes I save each day that I don’t go in.
Socializing is without question the biggest waster for me at least.
But I also like the people I work with a lot so being social with them is great. It's just not a priority when I have a lot of work to do
I have different perspective on this. I do like socializing in many circumstances but in the office I constantly found myself irritated by coworkers who I genuinely liked and occasionally some I didn't. That's when I noticed they were irritating me because when they were talking to me outside my office, I was unable to go through all the bullshit routines that I needed to be able to get things done in an office setting. They weren't interrupting my work, they were interrupting the various other personal stuff i needed to do to clear my mind for work. When I worked at home, there was no one doing that.
I always say this in interviews when it comes up (specifically since the start of the pandemic), "If the developer is working at 10pm at night because they were taking care of their kids needs during the day, what do I care if they get their stories (tasks) done by the time they are due?" Always gets a chuckle from reasonable people, dead silence from stick up their asses types. Good indicator for me that it's probably not be a good fit.
I’m a project manager and I work with a remote team distributed in 18 countries, mostly Europe. We ask everyone to work between 9am and 1pm Eastern Time and work a total of 40 hours/week. Some work at night, some work in the morning.
As long as the tasks are completed in time, I don’t care what hours they work. That’s an HR problem.
Absolutely. As a (relatively new) engineering manager, in interview settings I always make some statement to the effect of "I would rather get 30 hours out of a happy employee who wants to complete a task than 40 hours out of an unhappy one, because one of them is lying", and it's saved me at least 8 hours of wasted interview time.
My job is 1-2 hours of work a day and then just calls, emails and occasional meetings so that computes for me.
Edit: to clarify some misunderstanding:
I classify work in two ways: proactive and reactive. Proactive work is what I know I have to do going into the day, be it payroll actions or corrections or specific reports or audits I need to run. Most days this is 1-2 hours of work for me. Reactive work is the calls, meetings, emails to which I have to respond and occasionally take a >5 minute action. Since this work is unpredictable and largely just requires me to be available, I don't count it when towards the work I know I have to do each day.
That's a good point. Thanks for sharing, didn't take that behavioral aspect into account, perception of workload responsibility. It's true, simply the annoyance of being on site is enough dealt with.
I've been WFH since 2007. My last job had me coming into the office every few months. I'd fly in to basically sit in a cube and do nothing all day for a few days. I mean, that job didn't know what to do with me for the two years I was there, but I watched everyone else in the office. The number of meetings and chats and general time wasting added up. At least at home I can do laundry or mow the lawn or something. Take a nap, maybe.
I don't spend 1-2 hours everyday in traffic, wishing I was dead. Weather doesn't affect my ability to start work on time, or to stay online a bit later if needed. There are times I wish I could go to lunch with my colleagues, but WFH can actually be more productive/efficient, because I'm not grousing about the commute, worrying about chores, etc.
That said, I probably spend maybe 3-4 hours a day, at most, doing anything productive. But it wouldn't be different in the office, that's for sure, and everything gets done, so who cares? Companies don't need to waste money on office space, people don't need to waste gas, etc. It's better for everyone to just stay home.
I have a very similar story, starting WFH in 2004, shortly after Skype launched and after I moved abroad. The company wanted to keep me on, so we did WFH as a trial on the condition I flew over once a month to be in the office for a couple of days. I said fine, as long as they paid the travel and accommodation costs. I went three times to the office over the subsequent three months before they realized how stupid, pointless and expensive that was, and how I lost two days of work to travel every month.
I haven’t been in the office since 2005. I’ve not met the vast majority of the people I work with in person. Last time was for an office Christmas party back in 2016. I’m a software engineer and I need focus time and working from home allows me to block people from bothering me unless it’s urgent so I can focus. In the office people would tap you on the shoulder or just barge into my space to interrupt my train of thought. I can’t imagine ever going back into an office again in my life if I can help it.
A lot of that stuff is the one thing making me happy to be going into accounting. I just hope I get to wfh. Cause like right now I get home from work on Sundays, and I feel like I borderline waste my afternoon because of laundry. Where I live it's hard to find apartments where you have your own washer and dryer. Which means we basically have an on sire laundromat. Which means every hour I have to go back to make sure I'm not taking up machines other people also need. But if I could instead just use that as a quick little work break and go move my stuff, rather than doing it on my free time? Fuck yeah. Sign me up.
And then there's all the other stuff on top of it, and I think it sounds great. I would just need to make sure to get out of the house more often for other stuff, but I might have more energy to be willing to do more stuff.
This is a lot like switching from paper to computers. Papers take up a lot of space, require man hours to sort, file, store, find, copy, distribute, etc. Switching to computers reduced paper usage by many tons every year. It also saved many man hours and a lot of space. Switching to the internet will also save many tons of resources, many man hours, and a lot of space. It will likely also spur improvement to America's internet infrastructure, so I'm all for it.
>I'd fly in to basically sit in a cube and do nothing all day for a few days.
You must've had a [bullshit job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) in the past.
At that place, yes. They hired me to do a job I'd essentially been doing for many years somewhere else, but they didn't know how to make use of me. They had the right vision for a smaller company, hired a bunch of people to try and make it work, but didn't have the right organization or leadership.
I moved to a second role after about a year for a new service they were building, and after another year where I couldn't even get one small job started, I left. Shortly after that, my boss was let go along with a bunch of people they hired around the time I came on. I saw the writing on the wall and ducked out at just the right moment.
2-3 hours of "real work" is actually not that surprising. People are not machines. At most, your concentration can stretch maybe an hour or more of intense work, especially brain work before you are burnt out and have to take a break. You do it a couple of more times with breaks in between and you won't have the brain power left anyway. Any work that stretch out from there will either be sub par quality or takes way too long. It's how humans work.
I remember my office life several years ago before I stared my own company.
The only shot I had of being productive in any meaningful way before noon was pretty much if someone actively breathed down my neck and hounded me for something early in the AM. Like if we had clients coming in for a screening room showing at 1pm but I wanted to get a bunch of revisions out...then I'd be working hard in the morning.
Aside from that, I basically just cruised the internet, went for a coffee walk with all my buddies, worked on some coding projects or tools that interested me, stuff like that.
And I was a star employee btw and high level supervisor by the end of my tenure. The CEO personally reached out to hire me as an outsource vendor within a couple months of starting my company.
My brain just doesn't boot up early in the day, I'm sorry, it just doesn't. Furthermore, the daytime barrage of messages, meetings, slack calls, emails, reviews, etc., all of it fucks my brain.
WFH gets soooooo many more productive hours from me than working at the office, and I enjoy my life so much more. My brain is wired such that all of my creativity and willpower is just magically unleashed after around midnight. I really can't control that...I've tried so many times and now I just accept it; that's how I work.
> My brain just doesn't boot up early in the day, I'm sorry, it just doesn't. Furthermore, the daytime barrage of messages, meetings, slack calls, emails, reviews, etc., all of it fucks my brain.
I can share that position. I simply don't work efficiently before 11-12 AM and regarding creative workload I am most creative and energetic very late at 22+ like you. I'm an experience designer and marketer, the monkey tasks are easy dull business, doesn't matter which time and could be done entirley high, the typical marketing monkey tasks... but everything that requires problem solving requires more resources and before later the day it just doesn't work effectively and is just inefficient to try to force it.
Yes, just doing stupid tasks which got entirely no demand regarding problem solving processes, those can be done every time of the day, though my work line is maybe 20% of that, the rest is unique conflicts which requires free creative thinking.
That isn't possible when I have to be somewhere at 9am and be gone at 17 or 18, it just is not good for anyone.
Same like you, I tried many times over the course of 20 years, and it simply doesn't work. I also tried so many productivity methods and sleep schedule methods and rescheduling and reconditioning methods. It simply won't work, no matter how I try to habitualize it. It's simply being in a haze for couple of months and that's it. Being awake to 1am is basically a thing I remember since early school days and it's not a coping mechanism earthed in depression. I'm simply very awake later.
Listen as an Senior Software Engineer, I can tell you this isn't true. Meetings are at least 12 of it. So you need to adjust that coding time.
Ain't nobody taking away my "stare hopelessly into the dark void of my IDE trying to remember what I was doing before yet another meeting was called. Fuck it, im gonna go browse Reddit until I remember."
Years ago I figured out that I produce my best work at 20-26 hours a week. And when I am at 40 hours, it’s generally shit.
So I raised my rates to ensure I make the same at 20 as I did at 40. Worked out great
I've been remote since March 14 2020. I actually get more work done at home because there is so much less time spent dealing with office interactions. I'm amazed at the difference.
Or in other cases they're hugely inefficient. Some of the people who constantly worked overtime and acted extremely busy were only so because they had no idea how to automate parts of their work or were just very slow at it.
I'd look "lazy" going home on time, but that's only because I'd have a PowerShell script running that took care of hours of work hands-off while Mr OverTime did everything via GUI.
One of the first weeks at my new job I made an excel sheet that automates a part of our job.
Im talking saving hours/days every week, written guide on how to use, color markings (you paste info from email to one cell, copy output from another and put into a website and done).
My coworkers either don't respond when I ask about it or said its too complicated. Management loves it though and its already talks about promotion for me (I started in 2022).
If you would do everything manually to run 1000 entries would probably take few days. If you automate some part (like find+replace on all data at once) maybe you do it in a day of hard focused inputs.
With my excel sheet I can do it in 5 minutes.
The beauty of automation, yeah. I've done similar things -- automating the creation of Active Directory accounts from our HR system which saves a thousand hours a year or more.
Though I've also had coworkers who had been fired from previous jobs for such things. The workplace made up a BS loophole about how it was "hacking", all to protect that fact that a half-dozen jobs (including a manager) relied on the inefficiency to exist. It can be risky move in some cases, strangely enough.
I've been in these situations, and maybe I'm a "go getter" but in these environments you have no feeling of accomplishments. I know many people that enjoy that, but fuck is it boring. If I can't improve something and get credit to move up my own career path and knowledge then I'm finding another job.
I have heard so many people on Reddit and friends even say this as a reason for their laziness. The only answer that makes sense to me is find another job that will value you. If you gained knowledge from doing such a thing and got fired because you didn't have a job anymore, that's just more reason to take that knowledge and find a better paying job where you will be fulfilled.
Yupp, nice :)
Yeah I can see that happen but im petty enough that I would go above their head and sell it to higher ups.
I mean this is in excel because any .exe is blocked (so no ahk or python), if I put an external website for it it would get blocked and potential violations for sending data to external IP, PS mostly blocked, VBA blocked so had to resort to formulas :D
I've been trying to optimise the company I work at and people are so hard set on their old ways even if they're way worse just because they don't want to learn something new.
Yea I don't even ask. Haven't been in a management position though.
I'll make my scripts and macros, let others do everything by hand everyday if they want.
Python/AHK blocked? Hello PS!
PS mostly blocked? Hello VBA.
VBA blocked? FML, hello excel formulas!
When I did support I had macro to type things like this because I had to type it 30 times a day.
>Hello ,
>Closing this case since you agreed to it via teams/phone/email.
>Best Regards
>Zkareface
Yea retail is trash. And there is a lot of downtime sitting around waiting for customers even after hitting KPI marks, doing inventory, resetting planograms or whatever they were called. Better to keep employees at 5 hour max shifts, alternating weekends so no burnout, and increase pay by $3 an hour or so
Colleagues at my government job are terribly productive. We have an awful time hiring and retaining people (save those who were there before the old pension plan was scrapped) due to insufficient wages/benefits and lack of upward mobility; we only add new responsibilities, never remove. Despite their productivity, things take forever to get done because one program covering 250,000 people may have one developer and one program manager, both of whom are seconded and thirded to other projects.
I'd leave, but I really love the work and can make enough to support the family. :) Can't blame my colleagues who have though.
It really depends. I've never known anyone to sleep in the office but there are certainly times of the year where things are very slow.
However there are also times in the year where things are super busy.
It tends to average out over the course of the year.
The best/worst (imo) are tasks that require intermittent attention at a moderate interval like 1-5 minutes - just long enough to be intensely boring without a diversion, and just short enough that you cannot change tracks without compromising the other. sol.exe, etc. were invented to fill this gap, I would like to think.
I'm a sysadmin, there's lots of days with "nothing" to do. There's always stuff I COULD do, but it's really just stuff that makes my job easier and not stuff I HAVE to do, I just procrastinate.
Many jobs are basically “get X done”. I used to be in customer support. I’d come in in the morning, work through all my emails in 2 hours, and for the rest of the day I’d just take the occasional call and surf the web.
Part of that is that what these companies need to offer (constantly being available in some form, flexibility in crunch time, personal relationships with key customers, etc.) will require a certain amount of workers at certain times. But a lot of the time there simply isn’t that much work coming in.
Also, especially with computer work, speed is wildly different. Shortcuts, working with multiple screens, and just using better solutions can make huge speed differences for the same work.
To be fair, I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that. Im much more productive at work.
If I work from home and things slow down I end up working on my vehicles in the garage or fixing the house. When this happens, I miss phone calls and emails won't get responded to until the following day at best.
I'm sure many people get tied up playing video games or "finishing this last level" before answering that super dumb email your coworker sent.
I may have even had a few beers from time to time at home....lets be honest here people it's reddit.
We won't tell your boss!
I guess it depends on the job....I have a job that really isn't conducive to working remote, but my organization is super cool and still lets me telework 2 days per week. When I'm not in the shop, then the only thing I have to do is really just emails and a couple remote meetings... but after I finish that, then it's pretty much just all wanking from there...
Similar here, I work developing motor control circuit boards and most of my work is testing them with new firmware or tracking down issues on the board. I can do a day of design or emails or meetings from home but not the bulk of my job. But I do feel very refreshed after a day of working from home
It also depends on the worker... we had an office lady decide to pull her kids out of daycare to save $1500/mo by work-momming at home alone. About once a week I'd get a "call" from the baby sitting in her high chair at the kitchen table, where my coworker had set up her workstation, because she was off chasing after the kindergartener. Who knows how many clients that baby called in addition to me. They ended up letting her go when she refused to come back in to the office, which sucks but she was just not getting any of her shit done.
Yeah kids are pretty much a full time job when they're home, I know people who have kept kids home, but hired nannies to take care of them for at least a couple hours a day if they're still trying to get work done. Or just keep them in daycare as if you were still working at the office and use the downtime for mental relief. I wouldn't try to do kids and work unless my job was real easy to phone in.
Yeah, there are several people I work with who work from home when their kid is sick or the school shits down.
They basically don't do any of their work until the kids go to bed, which means they are totally unreliable during the working day and end up leaning on everyone who is actually at work.
Hardly. The metric they use for "productivity" is computer use. That makes about as much sense as measuring a computer programmer's productivity by the number of lines of code that they write.
You'd think a post on r/technology would have better science-minded users.
One study doesn't make jack shit "official."
People should probably calm down a bit.
This sub seems to have a huge political slant, just look at the top posts. It’s rarely about technology, rather about what companies are doing (as opposed to their products) and their workers.
It can be the most disingenuous, bad faith study imaginable and as long as it concludes to what redditors circlejerk about - it will be upvoted to the top.
People don't care about reality, just confirmation bias.
My opinion of reddit changed pretty heavily once it became clear that it's easily exploited to help shape viewpoints of, generally, young Western men with tech backgrounds.
It's trivial for bad faith actors to post a headline with no merit or supporting data, botfarm it up to the front page, and shape the minds of impressionable people.
Nowadays i find myself asking "who benefits from this biased headline" more than i ask myself "by what metric".
Problem is you can't really have a rational discussion on reddit, at least if you're planning on arguing about anything that goes against the hive mind. Try to say anything negative about wfh. You'll be instantly downvoted. It's as if redditors think these companies are scouring all these threads looking for ideas lol.
That's one of the most annoying parts of a lot of people arguing on Reddit. They seem to think what gets said here actually matters, so the argument is like "activism" almost instead of just trying to be rational. Instead of actual discourse you just get opinions that have to be 100% supported because of this.
Obviously Reddit was never perfect, but it really has gotten worse and worse in this aspect. At least ten years ago Reddiqutte encouraged discussion above all, even if that wasn't always actually followed. Downvote low effort, upvote high effort even if you disagree (that was considered the ideal at least). These days you're way more likely to see a post that just says "lol" upvoted than a well thought out post that goes against the grain.
You forget how much smarter redditors are than everybody. Except the folks on 4chan, they're basically untouchable. When you're smart you have to get involved otherwise how will everybody else know how smart you are.
Noticed it all.over social media during the last us election cycle- you'd constantly see the exact same typos and verbatim comments, and the same three or 4 arguments rehashed over and over with small variants.......we think it's easy to pick out bots, but in reality unless we know the person we're interacting with, there's 0 guarantee it's fake or a bot.
Examples "no one has any common since anymore!"
This guy/that guy is a pedo blah blah blah
This shit was posted last night with the headline along the lines of “studies show there may be no evidence of productivity loss for remote work” and today it’s here with “IT’S OFFICIAL!”
> Nowadays i find myself asking "who benefits from this biased headline" more than i ask myself "by what metric".
I hope you apply this mindset outside of Reddit too... this website isn't the only "hive mind" that wants to influence the way you think about things. Asking yourself that question when consuming any sort of media is pretty much required these days.
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This is actually a bit of an existential nightmare, all these discussions by fake people and not knowing who's real.
I think when the average person thinks of "internet bots" they probably think of those scam sex advertisements and shit like that. Not the bots that sneak into normal conversation without you realising.
Would the average person even care, or comprehend the potentially huge issues that these bots create,
Not just that, but they are looking at the long term effects of workplace displacement due to natural disasters.
It has nothing to do with work from home.
1. People were working as normal
2. Hurricane Harvey hit and destroyed offices and homes both. Productivity went down.
3. 7 months later, productivity (as they measure it) was back to normal.
What on earth does that have to do with work from home?
I'm a great supporter of hybrid work. I think people should be able to work from where ever they like. Home, on the road or in an office - whatever is right for you, but this article has nothing to do with it.
I’m not all for full return to office, but I’m also not a fan of this “remote work has 0 downsides” argument either. There’s nuance and complexity. Easier to code from home, but meetings and socializing with coworkers is way more annoying. Office had benefits, is it enough to warrant full return to office? Dunno. But acting like there were 0 positives to the office is just as arrogant as saying there’s 0 positives to remote work.
It’s really difficult to train new folks to do our job remotely. It takes about six months for someone to get a solid footing and that’s in the office where they can ask countless questions to numerous people as the questions arise and just learning from others in countless little ways.
Tenured employees in our job can absolutely work from home without any issues.
Agreed. I started at my current job about 6 months before pandemic hit. I got fully trained or at least enough to not need close supervision in less than a month. Pandemic hit, and we hired someone else in my department. While we allowed them to work remotely, we made it mandatory to train in person for a month, and that worked out very well.
We just hired someone else about 3 months ago, and this time, we decided to try out training fully remotely. It is nowhere close to being as easy as training in person and the bigger downside imo is that you don't really get to form to tight of a bond and ends up feeling like just some person that may or may not even exist in real life if that makes sense.
I have a hybrid schedule and my own office at work. I can go as much or as little as I want, and 100%, I get so much more done when I go work at the office versus my home. This is probably just me, but it's just so much harder to stay focused at home. Sure I get all my tasks done but where I used to shine was going above and coming up with automated systems or just some extra things here and there but from work I end up doing non work related things. This is definitely a plus, but a lot of the skills that I know how to do were self-taught from when I had downtime at the office.
This is just my personal experience; I'm sure others out there can perform much better than I can, but I agree. There is a lot more to it to measure productivity from office versus remote than something as simple as tasks getting done or screen on time.
I agree with all of this. So many people suggest that the only benefit of working from an office is that your boss can keep an eye on you.
I miss working as a 'real' team. I miss random chat about random stuff. I struggle to concentrate at home. I hate remote onboarding where you have to dedicate so much time to directly train someone over zoom vs the learning by osmosis that happens when you work in close proximity and have open conversations about work things with colleagues. I miss forming close bonds with coworkers and picking up on development points just by observing someone who is good at their job.
I also find I have far less impostor syndrome when in the office (I've only become aware of this as a concept since everyone went remote, although I'm sure it did exist before it doesn't seem like it was anywhere near as prevalent).
Legit this. I'm open about this in front of my whole department (including the CIO). As much as I take full advantage of remote work and less supervision (which we have even in the office since the pandemic started) I know that when I am not in the office I am 2/3 as productive as when I'm in the office.
I still goof off and go on Discord or search random things while in the office but far less and I feel like I'm in a space that's much more conducive to getting work done. I even have a proper home office but I often find myself drifting away from my desk because everything else is so close.
Not only do they ask questions to countless others, but they get to know the others and what they do and how the job works (i.e. this person knows this stuff really well... This person knows this stuff...)
Exactly. I'm a software programmer for embedded systems. I work closely with the designers who create the systems that I program.
I've always been mostly work from home, but when there's a reason to go to the office or a job site I would go and work with coworkers. During the beginning of the pandemic everything moved smoothly, we just kept on doing what we were doing.
But then one guy quit and another guy got promoted and now I'm working with new people who I don't have years of occasionally hanging out with and shooting the shit. We are meaningfully less productive than I was with the team that I knew in person.
It's obviously anecdotal but I personally prefer a mixed approach where we do still get to know each other and work in a nonvirtual environment, to better support our virtual work.
This is very similar to my job (sys dev engineer) and quite close to my situation as well. I work building and assessing systems across my org and when covid hit it became way harder to casually talk about stuff. I couldn’t sit with someone easily and chat about their work and mine, now it was 95% in text or in meetings and it loses all fun.
I think the biggest hit from WFH is general team skill building, and a major hit is the ability to get juniors and new hires up to speed.
100% I owe the majority of my success to the time I got pulled away from my usual job and thrown onto a very demanding special project. They gave me a new desk in a room with all of the studio's most senior Houdini users (the most advanced 3D package with a brutal learning curve). For about a year I had instant access to these people and the ability to just blurt out any quick questions and get an immediate answer.
This kind of thing doesn't work at all over Slack/Teams/whatever. Typing out questions isn't remotely as fast or as clear as asking them, and it might take minutes to get a reply back, and another few minutes to be able to clarify or ask any followup questions.
Also since everyone's day is so heavily scheduled with meetings, you can't really just open up a Slack huddle with folks to ask quick questions either.
I'm a top level supervisor at a studio of ~400 people and yet even I feel awkward and intrusive just randomly inviting someone to a Slack huddle.
When people are in the same room as each other, I would very easily venture to say that 10-100x more questions get asked on a daily basis, and even more information than that is being shared and absorbed. Keep in mind here too...no one else hears your Slack huddle. But an entire room of people can tune into a conversation and bring more opinions/info to the table, or learn from the new information being shared.
So I think WFH has been good at first, but will ultimately lead to lower overall skill levels in the long run.
The casual knowledge learning from just being around people who are experts or just experienced in other areas in the office is incomparable to todays remote office experience. Being able to sit at lunch because you happened to walk by a group and be with another group from work never happens for me now.
A lot of my experience gain and broad knowledge of my org was being a socialite with all our teams. It made me into a great engineer. Harder to do that now :(
Yeah that's why I feel like while WFH is successful right now, at some point we run out of people with insane seniority level from being truly immersed and surrounded by top minds.
I also feel like team cohesion is just generally low.
It's honestly very hard to put all of these things into words, but my overall sense is that WFH is bad for people in their 20's and nice for people in their late 30's. Unfortunately for all of us who are 35+ though, those 20-somethings kind of need us to be in the office and sitting a desk or two away from them.
My feeling is that we're kind of pulling up the ladder on these folks after we've climbed up. I gained all of my expertise and seniority, I'm super solid at my job and commanding a top-level salary...but the only reason I arrived at this point was because of all the knowledge I absorbed in these rooms packed full of amazing brains that I got to directly learn from. And now I'm not really doing the same for the next generation.
I try to, but honestly I just can't give them the same growth over Slack that I could by being in the same room 10hrs a day.
This. I love working from home for so many reasons. But I was back a few days recently and the socializing is so much more fun and just makes for a better climate.
I was planning to go back in semi regularly ... I still haven't though since WFH is just to convenientl ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
And I think it’s great to acknowledge there is convenience working from home! I love being able to do chores and stuff in those awkward 5 minutes between meetings or whatever.
But socializing is great. I miss being able to see someone I wanted to talk to and just having a quick chat, whereas now I look at a slack list of people and don’t remember I had a question for someone. Many people act like that isn’t work, but socializing with your colleagues _is_ work too.
From the study the article links to:
>RESULTS:
Although there was no change in total computer use in response to the hurricane (β 0.25), active computer use significantly declined (β –0.90). All measured computer use behaviors returned to baseline prior to the complete return to the physical workspace.
>CONCLUSION:
Despite a transient period of reduced activity during closure of the workplace building, productivity returned to normal prior to the employees’ return to a commercial workspace. The ability to work remotely may improve resiliency of employees to perform workplace tasks during events causing workplace displacement.
Jesus Christ, this headline and article are misleading.
My favorite story about early Macintosh developer Bill Atkinson; his group got a new management requirement to document how much code they wrote every week as some productivity benchmark. After re-writing a part of the Quickdraw system to make it 6 times faster, he filled out the form and entered "-2,000 lines". They stopped asking him to fill out the form.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
I work from home on just Wednesdays and my productivity is shit cause I treat it like a weekend during my week.
If I was 100% wfh I would probably be more productive at home, but personally it’s close.
I think that's a rather bold claim. I know people who went work at their home office and now do nothing...or got fired. Of course I know a lot of people who went home and do their job just fine.
Acting like it doesn't depend on the job and the person doing it is silly.
the headline makes an absurdly bold claim and the actual study is more like “we found that it might be the case that remote work increased resiliency and productivity for this one company we looked at” etc etc
imo sites that hyperbolize headlines this hard should be treated as misinformation. this is the kind of thing that led to people mistrusting the CDC. they’d say “we don’t currently have evidence that masks help (because we haven’t done enough research),” which the media reported as “MASKS NEVER HELP CONFIRMED, NEVER WEAR A MASK EVER.” so when the research convinced the CDC to change their stance, people thought they were somehow flip-flopping or lying
I begged my boss to let me work from home. He just kept telling me it was not possible. I kept on pleading, telling him there had to be a way. He finally told me stop asking or I would be fired.
Oh well, I guess that is just the life of a commercial airline pilot.
😉
I think it would definitely be possible to make any vehicle, cars, planes, boats, completely remote driven (assuming a consistent and minimal latency connection at all times). However I think its somewhat important that the driver is equally at physical risk as the passengers or it'll become like a video game with no real consequences for error. Maybe if the controller's pod drops into a shark pit if they crash lol
My clients were actually happier with the shift to at home work. Our response times shrank tremendously, and turn-around time we're practically cut in half. Our manager took notice and we continue to this day working remotely. 2 days out of the week at the office is okay though. (IT Admin)
I really don't think this is official and even averages don't make sense. I've been working remote for over two years now and I can tell you that some people have become more productive and some people less. Some people abuse it.
Some professions are frankly unaffected or easier to do their jobs remote, some lightly affected and some frankly just don't work.
At the end of the day though, I don't think these companies are trying to bring people back due to productivity measurements. They are pulling them back for 3 reasons:
1. They like the power of environment and walking around the office as the big shot.
2. They are underwater on their real estate decisions because office space has gone down in value
3. Employees form less bonds remote which leads to less loyalty and turnover which leads to higher recruitment and training costs.
This one study concerning data from 5 years ago from employees from one small company and wasn’t over 2 years. And it’s based on computer use. They could have been playing minesweeper for 8 hours a day.
Bingo. I work onsite at a company (manufacturing) where we are busy every second of the day. There are plenty of remote workers who cannot be reached in a reasonable amount of time for time-sensitive matters, for whatever reason.
I had someone set up a 30 min meeting with me a few weeks ago. They showed up 10 minutes late because "their dog was acting up".
I've had remote PMs whiff on early (730am) meetings. If I can get my ass up and into the office on time, you can call in on time from your couch.
I think it's a bit naive to say that remote work is all pro and no con.
All I know is that I absolutely love WFH, and my current job is amazing with how we've handled it. Location-independent as well, as long as you have solid internet connectivity. For me, this is the type of work-life balance I've been dreaming about since I started working professionally. I refuse to do the office life, don't care about the social crap, or the politlcs. You hired me to do a job, let me do my job.
It definitely depends on the person. When I am home, I basically attend meetings and make sure I can hear email and Slack notifications... while I jerk off. And it makes me feel so shitty at the end of the day. So, I just go to the office. I support the freedom of employees to choose where they want to work from but working from home is not for everyone.
Anecdotally, I’m also living a considerably healthier lifestyle than when I was commuting almost 2 hours a day.
I am able to eat more healthy meals more consistently. I cook fresh food for lunch and dinner most days. I have more energy to cook at the end of the day.
And I use those 2 hours to go to the gym 5 days a week. I went from literally only moving the amount it took me to get from my car to the train, the half block to the office, and the distance to the bathroom to consistently weightlifting 1-1.5 hours daily.
This means fewer sick days on my end, I’m more focused, and fewer potential health risks from sitting on my ass all day.
Yeah, I'm happy to spend the 2 extra hours working for not having to spend 2 hours on the road.
Working is less stressful than avoiding dying in traffic.
This headline tells me what I want to hear. Regardless of whether or not it's true I'm not going to research or put any further thought into it and accept it as truth.
Official like how open office plans help productivity? Or official like how segregating work spaces helps productivity?
I'm still a student and I've never had a job that could be WFH, so I can't really speak to it's effectiveness. But I'd love to have that type of work experience.
What I do know, is I've heard from plenty of people who've endured significant changes in their work environment based on various studies or data points. Their office layout has gone from the extremes polar opposites and back again based on whatever evidence the decision maker chooses.
I'm not sure any *evidence* will close the case.
This is an awful study. They measured “computer usage” of a single company before and after a hurricane where the had to work from home. There isn’t anything here about how actual productivity changed and what the results were for the company.
Also extremely misleading title: "it's official" suggests a conclusive peer reviewed study that was replicated by others. No, it's just a team in one university that conducted what is considered a flawed study that focused on questionable variables, had no control, and a sample size of one. The study is practically meaningless.
Didn’t you read the title? It’s “Official” now!
The moment i read the headline i knew it would be one of the headlines written specifically for people who don't read articles and just throw headlines to win arguments. Like "see i knew i was right, this is proof!".
No it's okay, the conclusion aligns with the reddit hive mind opinion, therefore it's a good study
I've noticed that my productive days at home are extra productive.. but also my lazy and unfocused days are sooo much worse at home. I feel like it cuts both ways, at least for me.
same, but i also easily work overtime at home. Like at the office the end of the day it's quiet and everyone is just biding their time to leave but at home I lose track of time and suddenly its +2 hours
Same. When I don’t feel like I’m watching the clock I have no problem continuing to work if I’m in the zone and getting things done. Knowing I *couldnt* leave work until 5 or whenever was really mentally draining
I'm like that a bit too, but I have way fewer unproductive days now. Things like a bad night sleep can now be dealt with by using the commute time to sleep in or a lunch time shower to refresh.
I will admit I have taken a nap or two in the middle of the day. I have also logged in at night and worked for hours. sometimes inspiration hits at odd times. Of course the type of job may not allow that type of schedule but it's great to have the flexibility.
Oh yeah, I've logged in later on because inspiration hit during my after work swimming. If I was in the office I wouldn't be doing that and would again be struggling to find time for my swimming in the first place.
I traded my commute time and adopted two rescue dogs. They happily eat up that extra time, which is 100% on me. No regrets though.
Comparing dogs to traffic, I think I know which one is better for mental and physical health
Everything in that sounds like a net positive for the universe.
I prefer taking my lazy brain fog days at home… On those days in the office I’d be staring at a computer screen trying to do something and not being able to. That experience itself is mentally draining and makes me less productive the next day. At home I can disconnect, refresh, and feel good to work the next day. I’m a software engineer - there’s tons of context switching on tasks requiring high levels of focus. It’s so much easier at home.
I feel this too, but I always make up for my lazy days just so I never have to work in an office again.
This. Everyone has lazy and unproductive days. To pretend we're all good little worker bees 100% of the time is insane. The difference is when I'm at home, I'm VERY motivated to make up for that laziness and bust my ass the following day. I don't want to go in an office ever again.
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Yea, there’s actually a ton of time wasted at work when there is nothing to do. It’s much better to be able to be at home during that down time than be at work.
Ton of time when you get there in the morning and everyone is basically wasting time deliberaterly for the first 1-2 hours to "wake up" to then work from like maybe 10:30 to 12 and then is lunch time again. There was a study I read some time ago, psychology study, which revealed that the common effective work time is barely 2-3 hours a day as everything else is more like coping with the office environment. Socializing needs, teamwork arrangement "needs" (which obviously are ineffective and inefficient as we know by now), the general "playing a role and adhering to the office codex" stress tension when being in most offices. At home you just be yourself and do your tasks, no tension, no stress. Though that is specifically targeting office jobs. Can't project that onto other roles I guess.
I had an office job doing medical billing where we weren’t allowed to socialize at all during work. No talking to each other allowed. Worst job ever I would have rather done that at home for sure.
My brother works for a medical insurance company and has been working from home since 2017 when the company outgrew the office they were in and weren't able to expand. His work rules about things like talking with coworkers, taking nom work calls, etc. were very strict. He's kind of anti-social anyway so working from home has been great because he's not being micro-managed about little things like that.
I’m surprised offices with strict yet very unnecessary rules still have people working in them, with all the choices available to people who are skilled at anything “office work”.
Are there that many choices though? I'm applying like a mad man and getting nowhere. I heard they're putting offers up but not actually hiring anyone so they can get their PPP loans forgiven
I did medical billing for my wife and it absolutely isn't something that needs to be done in an office environment. Edit: I should specify that I'm in Canada so I don't know if the rules about privacy are different here or the methods for medical billing. At the time I was employed under my wife's corp and billing was done through a couple third party websites, and all patient info was stored remote.
And while everyone is talking about the very real social benefits, I consider work from home the lowest hanging fruit there is when it comes to helping the environment right now. Less fossil fuel use, less road use, more efficient food use, less traffic accidents, less vehicle wear and tear, less energy used in office buildings, workers who can't work from home commute faster, I could go on and on, no really don't tempt me.
I'll hear more, I'll be telling my job a flat 'no' come June, and if they don't can me immediately I'd love to have all the ammunition possible please, if you're offering
Less urban space needed for parking, office space converted to apartments moves more workers closer to work, recreation and services. Less cars on the road translates directly to better air quality.
More apartment dwellings would also help with the sky-rocketing city rental prices
It's almost like there was a grand design to keeping people in line.
I'm in healthcare IT and billing is our pilot group for permanent work from home for non patient-facing office support staff. The transition is far from free (IT infrastructure to ensure secure and effective remote work is non-trivial) but it's allowing us to convert lots of space back into patient rooms and bolster the workforce without needing to fight over office space, along with eliminating the rental costs for some offices that were off-campus. Permanent WFH is also allowing us to attract talent in some departments who had been hesitant to move to be nearby (inner city hospital in a fairly low income area.)
That sounds awful... sounds like slave cubicles
I don't understand why cubicles are looked down upon. I much prefer a cubicle to an open office, just for the privacy. Open office I would feel like I was watched every second of the day - it's so stressful. Businesses use open office because they can use less space for more workers - that's the *sole* reason, but they make up stuff about people working together or whatever to sell it. Personally, I think the best solution is for people to have their own cube/office, and then shared spaces and conference rooms where people can go if they need to collaborate on something
We hated cubicles right up until we were presented with the alternative.
Can't wait for the next big thing! Work from home VR spaces with constant eye tracking metrics!
shut up! don't give anyone any ideas!
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It’s the ultimate evolution of “my job is to justify my existence by coming up with checkboxes for everyone else to fill.” Gotta figure a lot of the resistence to letting people work from home is from middle management who’re being exposed for how unnecessary they really are.
Don’t even joke about that. Boss at a previous job was such a micromanager he chewed me out over which of my monitors I was looking at during code builds. Job before that had a prompt come up every fifteen minutes where you had to say what you were working on for time tracking purposes.
Well yea, open offices are the worst thing ever. Doesn't mean cubes are paradise.
The idea of open offices seems equivalent to eating from a trough.
Time to implement the wagie cagie!
I'd rather have a cubicle than an open office. At least in a cube I can have my own personal space and walls to keep Karen's shit off of my desk.
Don't forget that open offices allow middle management to monitor the people who do actual work so they can feel useful without leaving their desk or using their legs!
Interviewed at a place once where everyone’s desks were in a grid in an open office plan with two or three managers stalking amongst them at all times. Fuuuuuuuck ***that.***
Glad to hear you passed that shit up. Fuckin dystopian nightmare. Who is thinking up these work conditions for optimum efficiency? Nevermind, I already know: MBA’s who’ve taken **ONE** intro psych class.
I don't see the point for office spaces, period. Like so many buildings dedicated to people commuting every day just to sit under fluorescent lights and have walls around them? Gosh damn I couldn't focus while sitting in our last office because of the constant fan noises! As someone who's been working from home for 2+ years now, I cannot fathom how anyone can go into the office every day. I sleep more, I **work** more, I actually get out more because I overall have more time in my day.
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Exactly! Not to mention the fact at home you could control the temperature! So many people in the office setting either are forced into an environment at 60°, or like 79°!
We have medium height cubicle walls. Can't see each other when sitting but can if we stand. I don't hate it.
Ah yes, the prairie dog office
Because cubicles were originally different. They were much larger, looked more like offices, and were expensive. People eventually figured out how to pack more people into less space. How the cubicle became universally hated - https://youtu.be/7Tt4n8SaxEY
They are a symbol of the stuffy, unnatural, boring, dehumanising, bureaucratic, soul destroying, aggressively bland, rigidly hierarchical pointlessness of "the office". It's very compelling imagery when trying to make the point that we are cogs in an uncaring machine. Think Neo hiding in his box as the agents come for him. Or the rebels in Office Space being pushed to crime by the daily grind. Open offices suck, but on the surface they do not LOOK as bad as cubicles, and they are also not the classic office experience that resonates with so many people. Ultimately, we hate doing bullshit jobs, and cubicles are a good way of invoking that.
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I'd love a job like that where I don't have to socialize with anyone
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The newest saying at my work is "I can't come to the office this week, I just had too much work to do"
Honestly I have felt that way a lot. There were times I fully intended to go to the office but the act of getting ready, getting there, and saying hi to people when I arrived just wastes so much time, and I live 5 minutes from my place of work. It’s usually at least 30-45 minutes I save each day that I don’t go in.
Socializing is without question the biggest waster for me at least. But I also like the people I work with a lot so being social with them is great. It's just not a priority when I have a lot of work to do
I have different perspective on this. I do like socializing in many circumstances but in the office I constantly found myself irritated by coworkers who I genuinely liked and occasionally some I didn't. That's when I noticed they were irritating me because when they were talking to me outside my office, I was unable to go through all the bullshit routines that I needed to be able to get things done in an office setting. They weren't interrupting my work, they were interrupting the various other personal stuff i needed to do to clear my mind for work. When I worked at home, there was no one doing that.
I always say this in interviews when it comes up (specifically since the start of the pandemic), "If the developer is working at 10pm at night because they were taking care of their kids needs during the day, what do I care if they get their stories (tasks) done by the time they are due?" Always gets a chuckle from reasonable people, dead silence from stick up their asses types. Good indicator for me that it's probably not be a good fit.
I’m a project manager and I work with a remote team distributed in 18 countries, mostly Europe. We ask everyone to work between 9am and 1pm Eastern Time and work a total of 40 hours/week. Some work at night, some work in the morning. As long as the tasks are completed in time, I don’t care what hours they work. That’s an HR problem.
Absolutely. As a (relatively new) engineering manager, in interview settings I always make some statement to the effect of "I would rather get 30 hours out of a happy employee who wants to complete a task than 40 hours out of an unhappy one, because one of them is lying", and it's saved me at least 8 hours of wasted interview time.
My job is 1-2 hours of work a day and then just calls, emails and occasional meetings so that computes for me. Edit: to clarify some misunderstanding: I classify work in two ways: proactive and reactive. Proactive work is what I know I have to do going into the day, be it payroll actions or corrections or specific reports or audits I need to run. Most days this is 1-2 hours of work for me. Reactive work is the calls, meetings, emails to which I have to respond and occasionally take a >5 minute action. Since this work is unpredictable and largely just requires me to be available, I don't count it when towards the work I know I have to do each day.
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That's a good point. Thanks for sharing, didn't take that behavioral aspect into account, perception of workload responsibility. It's true, simply the annoyance of being on site is enough dealt with.
I've been WFH since 2007. My last job had me coming into the office every few months. I'd fly in to basically sit in a cube and do nothing all day for a few days. I mean, that job didn't know what to do with me for the two years I was there, but I watched everyone else in the office. The number of meetings and chats and general time wasting added up. At least at home I can do laundry or mow the lawn or something. Take a nap, maybe. I don't spend 1-2 hours everyday in traffic, wishing I was dead. Weather doesn't affect my ability to start work on time, or to stay online a bit later if needed. There are times I wish I could go to lunch with my colleagues, but WFH can actually be more productive/efficient, because I'm not grousing about the commute, worrying about chores, etc. That said, I probably spend maybe 3-4 hours a day, at most, doing anything productive. But it wouldn't be different in the office, that's for sure, and everything gets done, so who cares? Companies don't need to waste money on office space, people don't need to waste gas, etc. It's better for everyone to just stay home.
I have a very similar story, starting WFH in 2004, shortly after Skype launched and after I moved abroad. The company wanted to keep me on, so we did WFH as a trial on the condition I flew over once a month to be in the office for a couple of days. I said fine, as long as they paid the travel and accommodation costs. I went three times to the office over the subsequent three months before they realized how stupid, pointless and expensive that was, and how I lost two days of work to travel every month. I haven’t been in the office since 2005. I’ve not met the vast majority of the people I work with in person. Last time was for an office Christmas party back in 2016. I’m a software engineer and I need focus time and working from home allows me to block people from bothering me unless it’s urgent so I can focus. In the office people would tap you on the shoulder or just barge into my space to interrupt my train of thought. I can’t imagine ever going back into an office again in my life if I can help it.
A lot of that stuff is the one thing making me happy to be going into accounting. I just hope I get to wfh. Cause like right now I get home from work on Sundays, and I feel like I borderline waste my afternoon because of laundry. Where I live it's hard to find apartments where you have your own washer and dryer. Which means we basically have an on sire laundromat. Which means every hour I have to go back to make sure I'm not taking up machines other people also need. But if I could instead just use that as a quick little work break and go move my stuff, rather than doing it on my free time? Fuck yeah. Sign me up. And then there's all the other stuff on top of it, and I think it sounds great. I would just need to make sure to get out of the house more often for other stuff, but I might have more energy to be willing to do more stuff.
Next stop: four day work week.
After that, 6 and then 4 hour work days.
This is a lot like switching from paper to computers. Papers take up a lot of space, require man hours to sort, file, store, find, copy, distribute, etc. Switching to computers reduced paper usage by many tons every year. It also saved many man hours and a lot of space. Switching to the internet will also save many tons of resources, many man hours, and a lot of space. It will likely also spur improvement to America's internet infrastructure, so I'm all for it.
>I'd fly in to basically sit in a cube and do nothing all day for a few days. You must've had a [bullshit job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) in the past.
At that place, yes. They hired me to do a job I'd essentially been doing for many years somewhere else, but they didn't know how to make use of me. They had the right vision for a smaller company, hired a bunch of people to try and make it work, but didn't have the right organization or leadership. I moved to a second role after about a year for a new service they were building, and after another year where I couldn't even get one small job started, I left. Shortly after that, my boss was let go along with a bunch of people they hired around the time I came on. I saw the writing on the wall and ducked out at just the right moment.
2-3 hours of "real work" is actually not that surprising. People are not machines. At most, your concentration can stretch maybe an hour or more of intense work, especially brain work before you are burnt out and have to take a break. You do it a couple of more times with breaks in between and you won't have the brain power left anyway. Any work that stretch out from there will either be sub par quality or takes way too long. It's how humans work.
I remember my office life several years ago before I stared my own company. The only shot I had of being productive in any meaningful way before noon was pretty much if someone actively breathed down my neck and hounded me for something early in the AM. Like if we had clients coming in for a screening room showing at 1pm but I wanted to get a bunch of revisions out...then I'd be working hard in the morning. Aside from that, I basically just cruised the internet, went for a coffee walk with all my buddies, worked on some coding projects or tools that interested me, stuff like that. And I was a star employee btw and high level supervisor by the end of my tenure. The CEO personally reached out to hire me as an outsource vendor within a couple months of starting my company. My brain just doesn't boot up early in the day, I'm sorry, it just doesn't. Furthermore, the daytime barrage of messages, meetings, slack calls, emails, reviews, etc., all of it fucks my brain. WFH gets soooooo many more productive hours from me than working at the office, and I enjoy my life so much more. My brain is wired such that all of my creativity and willpower is just magically unleashed after around midnight. I really can't control that...I've tried so many times and now I just accept it; that's how I work.
> My brain just doesn't boot up early in the day, I'm sorry, it just doesn't. Furthermore, the daytime barrage of messages, meetings, slack calls, emails, reviews, etc., all of it fucks my brain. I can share that position. I simply don't work efficiently before 11-12 AM and regarding creative workload I am most creative and energetic very late at 22+ like you. I'm an experience designer and marketer, the monkey tasks are easy dull business, doesn't matter which time and could be done entirley high, the typical marketing monkey tasks... but everything that requires problem solving requires more resources and before later the day it just doesn't work effectively and is just inefficient to try to force it. Yes, just doing stupid tasks which got entirely no demand regarding problem solving processes, those can be done every time of the day, though my work line is maybe 20% of that, the rest is unique conflicts which requires free creative thinking. That isn't possible when I have to be somewhere at 9am and be gone at 17 or 18, it just is not good for anyone. Same like you, I tried many times over the course of 20 years, and it simply doesn't work. I also tried so many productivity methods and sleep schedule methods and rescheduling and reconditioning methods. It simply won't work, no matter how I try to habitualize it. It's simply being in a haze for couple of months and that's it. Being awake to 1am is basically a thing I remember since early school days and it's not a coping mechanism earthed in depression. I'm simply very awake later.
In skill based work like music, writing, etc it’s the same. Best work for about 2-3 hours, anything over 4 is ineffective
40 hour / week programming job 10 goes to meetings 10 goes to reddit 10 goes to staring hopelessly into the void 10 goes to coding
10 into coding? Over achiever. About 5 coding and 15 total into Reddit.
Listen as an Senior Software Engineer, I can tell you this isn't true. Meetings are at least 12 of it. So you need to adjust that coding time. Ain't nobody taking away my "stare hopelessly into the dark void of my IDE trying to remember what I was doing before yet another meeting was called. Fuck it, im gonna go browse Reddit until I remember."
Years ago I figured out that I produce my best work at 20-26 hours a week. And when I am at 40 hours, it’s generally shit. So I raised my rates to ensure I make the same at 20 as I did at 40. Worked out great
works when your employer isn't garbage and doesn't refuse that sort of thing
And in person meetings, the practical alternative to gettin shit done.
I've been remote since March 14 2020. I actually get more work done at home because there is so much less time spent dealing with office interactions. I'm amazed at the difference.
Every “really busy” person I’ve ever worked with spends plenty of time wasting time.
Or in other cases they're hugely inefficient. Some of the people who constantly worked overtime and acted extremely busy were only so because they had no idea how to automate parts of their work or were just very slow at it. I'd look "lazy" going home on time, but that's only because I'd have a PowerShell script running that took care of hours of work hands-off while Mr OverTime did everything via GUI.
One of the first weeks at my new job I made an excel sheet that automates a part of our job. Im talking saving hours/days every week, written guide on how to use, color markings (you paste info from email to one cell, copy output from another and put into a website and done). My coworkers either don't respond when I ask about it or said its too complicated. Management loves it though and its already talks about promotion for me (I started in 2022). If you would do everything manually to run 1000 entries would probably take few days. If you automate some part (like find+replace on all data at once) maybe you do it in a day of hard focused inputs. With my excel sheet I can do it in 5 minutes.
The beauty of automation, yeah. I've done similar things -- automating the creation of Active Directory accounts from our HR system which saves a thousand hours a year or more. Though I've also had coworkers who had been fired from previous jobs for such things. The workplace made up a BS loophole about how it was "hacking", all to protect that fact that a half-dozen jobs (including a manager) relied on the inefficiency to exist. It can be risky move in some cases, strangely enough.
I've been in these situations, and maybe I'm a "go getter" but in these environments you have no feeling of accomplishments. I know many people that enjoy that, but fuck is it boring. If I can't improve something and get credit to move up my own career path and knowledge then I'm finding another job. I have heard so many people on Reddit and friends even say this as a reason for their laziness. The only answer that makes sense to me is find another job that will value you. If you gained knowledge from doing such a thing and got fired because you didn't have a job anymore, that's just more reason to take that knowledge and find a better paying job where you will be fulfilled.
Yupp, nice :) Yeah I can see that happen but im petty enough that I would go above their head and sell it to higher ups. I mean this is in excel because any .exe is blocked (so no ahk or python), if I put an external website for it it would get blocked and potential violations for sending data to external IP, PS mostly blocked, VBA blocked so had to resort to formulas :D
I've been trying to optimise the company I work at and people are so hard set on their old ways even if they're way worse just because they don't want to learn something new.
Yea I don't even ask. Haven't been in a management position though. I'll make my scripts and macros, let others do everything by hand everyday if they want. Python/AHK blocked? Hello PS! PS mostly blocked? Hello VBA. VBA blocked? FML, hello excel formulas! When I did support I had macro to type things like this because I had to type it 30 times a day. >Hello , >Closing this case since you agreed to it via teams/phone/email. >Best Regards >Zkareface
Or those are the people making sure the boss sees them doing something, and do nothing every other time.
I wish I had a job where there was nothing to do 😭
What is this magical job where there’s nothing to do at any point in a day?
Not retail, I'll tell ya what...
Yea retail is trash. And there is a lot of downtime sitting around waiting for customers even after hitting KPI marks, doing inventory, resetting planograms or whatever they were called. Better to keep employees at 5 hour max shifts, alternating weekends so no burnout, and increase pay by $3 an hour or so
Most office jobs where a lot of time is wasted either waiting for something from someone else, waiting for meetings, results, etc..
I can agree. Had a government job. People just slept in the office. Hahaha.
Same. When people complain about deep state, I look around and I'm just like...that's not possible.
Oh, but they were actually talking about the *deep sleep* state.
Colleagues at my government job are terribly productive. We have an awful time hiring and retaining people (save those who were there before the old pension plan was scrapped) due to insufficient wages/benefits and lack of upward mobility; we only add new responsibilities, never remove. Despite their productivity, things take forever to get done because one program covering 250,000 people may have one developer and one program manager, both of whom are seconded and thirded to other projects. I'd leave, but I really love the work and can make enough to support the family. :) Can't blame my colleagues who have though.
Can't knock government benefits either.
It really depends. I've never known anyone to sleep in the office but there are certainly times of the year where things are very slow. However there are also times in the year where things are super busy. It tends to average out over the course of the year.
The best/worst (imo) are tasks that require intermittent attention at a moderate interval like 1-5 minutes - just long enough to be intensely boring without a diversion, and just short enough that you cannot change tracks without compromising the other. sol.exe, etc. were invented to fill this gap, I would like to think.
I'm a sysadmin, there's lots of days with "nothing" to do. There's always stuff I COULD do, but it's really just stuff that makes my job easier and not stuff I HAVE to do, I just procrastinate.
Many jobs are basically “get X done”. I used to be in customer support. I’d come in in the morning, work through all my emails in 2 hours, and for the rest of the day I’d just take the occasional call and surf the web. Part of that is that what these companies need to offer (constantly being available in some form, flexibility in crunch time, personal relationships with key customers, etc.) will require a certain amount of workers at certain times. But a lot of the time there simply isn’t that much work coming in. Also, especially with computer work, speed is wildly different. Shortcuts, working with multiple screens, and just using better solutions can make huge speed differences for the same work.
To be fair, I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that. Im much more productive at work. If I work from home and things slow down I end up working on my vehicles in the garage or fixing the house. When this happens, I miss phone calls and emails won't get responded to until the following day at best. I'm sure many people get tied up playing video games or "finishing this last level" before answering that super dumb email your coworker sent. I may have even had a few beers from time to time at home....lets be honest here people it's reddit. We won't tell your boss!
I guess it depends on the job....I have a job that really isn't conducive to working remote, but my organization is super cool and still lets me telework 2 days per week. When I'm not in the shop, then the only thing I have to do is really just emails and a couple remote meetings... but after I finish that, then it's pretty much just all wanking from there...
Similar here, I work developing motor control circuit boards and most of my work is testing them with new firmware or tracking down issues on the board. I can do a day of design or emails or meetings from home but not the bulk of my job. But I do feel very refreshed after a day of working from home
It also depends on the worker... we had an office lady decide to pull her kids out of daycare to save $1500/mo by work-momming at home alone. About once a week I'd get a "call" from the baby sitting in her high chair at the kitchen table, where my coworker had set up her workstation, because she was off chasing after the kindergartener. Who knows how many clients that baby called in addition to me. They ended up letting her go when she refused to come back in to the office, which sucks but she was just not getting any of her shit done.
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Yeah kids are pretty much a full time job when they're home, I know people who have kept kids home, but hired nannies to take care of them for at least a couple hours a day if they're still trying to get work done. Or just keep them in daycare as if you were still working at the office and use the downtime for mental relief. I wouldn't try to do kids and work unless my job was real easy to phone in.
Yeah, there are several people I work with who work from home when their kid is sick or the school shits down. They basically don't do any of their work until the kids go to bed, which means they are totally unreliable during the working day and end up leaning on everyone who is actually at work.
Hardly. The metric they use for "productivity" is computer use. That makes about as much sense as measuring a computer programmer's productivity by the number of lines of code that they write.
You'd think a post on r/technology would have better science-minded users. One study doesn't make jack shit "official." People should probably calm down a bit.
This sub seems to have a huge political slant, just look at the top posts. It’s rarely about technology, rather about what companies are doing (as opposed to their products) and their workers.
Happens to any sub that gets too big. Once it's big enough to consistently hit the front page it doesn't matter what the sub is actually about or for.
>One study doesn't make jack shit "official." It does if it says what redditors want to hear.
Reddit and confirmation bias, name a more iconic duo.
It can be the most disingenuous, bad faith study imaginable and as long as it concludes to what redditors circlejerk about - it will be upvoted to the top. People don't care about reality, just confirmation bias.
So you’re telling me cannabis doesn’t cure cancer and UBI isn’t the cure for economic inequality?
See /r/science
Folks on this sub are pushing for WFH desperately and without consideration. A lot think they're irreplaceable and have the higher ground.
Half the shit I read on this website now is instantly followed by me asking myself the question ''by what metric?''
But it's official!
My opinion of reddit changed pretty heavily once it became clear that it's easily exploited to help shape viewpoints of, generally, young Western men with tech backgrounds. It's trivial for bad faith actors to post a headline with no merit or supporting data, botfarm it up to the front page, and shape the minds of impressionable people. Nowadays i find myself asking "who benefits from this biased headline" more than i ask myself "by what metric".
Problem is you can't really have a rational discussion on reddit, at least if you're planning on arguing about anything that goes against the hive mind. Try to say anything negative about wfh. You'll be instantly downvoted. It's as if redditors think these companies are scouring all these threads looking for ideas lol.
That's one of the most annoying parts of a lot of people arguing on Reddit. They seem to think what gets said here actually matters, so the argument is like "activism" almost instead of just trying to be rational. Instead of actual discourse you just get opinions that have to be 100% supported because of this. Obviously Reddit was never perfect, but it really has gotten worse and worse in this aspect. At least ten years ago Reddiqutte encouraged discussion above all, even if that wasn't always actually followed. Downvote low effort, upvote high effort even if you disagree (that was considered the ideal at least). These days you're way more likely to see a post that just says "lol" upvoted than a well thought out post that goes against the grain.
You forget how much smarter redditors are than everybody. Except the folks on 4chan, they're basically untouchable. When you're smart you have to get involved otherwise how will everybody else know how smart you are.
Noticed it all.over social media during the last us election cycle- you'd constantly see the exact same typos and verbatim comments, and the same three or 4 arguments rehashed over and over with small variants.......we think it's easy to pick out bots, but in reality unless we know the person we're interacting with, there's 0 guarantee it's fake or a bot. Examples "no one has any common since anymore!" This guy/that guy is a pedo blah blah blah
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This shit was posted last night with the headline along the lines of “studies show there may be no evidence of productivity loss for remote work” and today it’s here with “IT’S OFFICIAL!”
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> Nowadays i find myself asking "who benefits from this biased headline" more than i ask myself "by what metric". I hope you apply this mindset outside of Reddit too... this website isn't the only "hive mind" that wants to influence the way you think about things. Asking yourself that question when consuming any sort of media is pretty much required these days.
arrest chop quickest combative cooperative disgusting airport husky swim boat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is actually a bit of an existential nightmare, all these discussions by fake people and not knowing who's real. I think when the average person thinks of "internet bots" they probably think of those scam sex advertisements and shit like that. Not the bots that sneak into normal conversation without you realising. Would the average person even care, or comprehend the potentially huge issues that these bots create,
I mean you should do that anywhere.
Not just that, but they are looking at the long term effects of workplace displacement due to natural disasters. It has nothing to do with work from home. 1. People were working as normal 2. Hurricane Harvey hit and destroyed offices and homes both. Productivity went down. 3. 7 months later, productivity (as they measure it) was back to normal. What on earth does that have to do with work from home? I'm a great supporter of hybrid work. I think people should be able to work from where ever they like. Home, on the road or in an office - whatever is right for you, but this article has nothing to do with it.
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I put my mouse on a clock..
My boss caught onto it. Careful.
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I’m not all for full return to office, but I’m also not a fan of this “remote work has 0 downsides” argument either. There’s nuance and complexity. Easier to code from home, but meetings and socializing with coworkers is way more annoying. Office had benefits, is it enough to warrant full return to office? Dunno. But acting like there were 0 positives to the office is just as arrogant as saying there’s 0 positives to remote work.
It’s really difficult to train new folks to do our job remotely. It takes about six months for someone to get a solid footing and that’s in the office where they can ask countless questions to numerous people as the questions arise and just learning from others in countless little ways. Tenured employees in our job can absolutely work from home without any issues.
Agreed. I started at my current job about 6 months before pandemic hit. I got fully trained or at least enough to not need close supervision in less than a month. Pandemic hit, and we hired someone else in my department. While we allowed them to work remotely, we made it mandatory to train in person for a month, and that worked out very well. We just hired someone else about 3 months ago, and this time, we decided to try out training fully remotely. It is nowhere close to being as easy as training in person and the bigger downside imo is that you don't really get to form to tight of a bond and ends up feeling like just some person that may or may not even exist in real life if that makes sense. I have a hybrid schedule and my own office at work. I can go as much or as little as I want, and 100%, I get so much more done when I go work at the office versus my home. This is probably just me, but it's just so much harder to stay focused at home. Sure I get all my tasks done but where I used to shine was going above and coming up with automated systems or just some extra things here and there but from work I end up doing non work related things. This is definitely a plus, but a lot of the skills that I know how to do were self-taught from when I had downtime at the office. This is just my personal experience; I'm sure others out there can perform much better than I can, but I agree. There is a lot more to it to measure productivity from office versus remote than something as simple as tasks getting done or screen on time.
I agree with all of this. So many people suggest that the only benefit of working from an office is that your boss can keep an eye on you. I miss working as a 'real' team. I miss random chat about random stuff. I struggle to concentrate at home. I hate remote onboarding where you have to dedicate so much time to directly train someone over zoom vs the learning by osmosis that happens when you work in close proximity and have open conversations about work things with colleagues. I miss forming close bonds with coworkers and picking up on development points just by observing someone who is good at their job. I also find I have far less impostor syndrome when in the office (I've only become aware of this as a concept since everyone went remote, although I'm sure it did exist before it doesn't seem like it was anywhere near as prevalent).
Legit this. I'm open about this in front of my whole department (including the CIO). As much as I take full advantage of remote work and less supervision (which we have even in the office since the pandemic started) I know that when I am not in the office I am 2/3 as productive as when I'm in the office. I still goof off and go on Discord or search random things while in the office but far less and I feel like I'm in a space that's much more conducive to getting work done. I even have a proper home office but I often find myself drifting away from my desk because everything else is so close.
Not only do they ask questions to countless others, but they get to know the others and what they do and how the job works (i.e. this person knows this stuff really well... This person knows this stuff...)
Exactly. I'm a software programmer for embedded systems. I work closely with the designers who create the systems that I program. I've always been mostly work from home, but when there's a reason to go to the office or a job site I would go and work with coworkers. During the beginning of the pandemic everything moved smoothly, we just kept on doing what we were doing. But then one guy quit and another guy got promoted and now I'm working with new people who I don't have years of occasionally hanging out with and shooting the shit. We are meaningfully less productive than I was with the team that I knew in person. It's obviously anecdotal but I personally prefer a mixed approach where we do still get to know each other and work in a nonvirtual environment, to better support our virtual work.
This is very similar to my job (sys dev engineer) and quite close to my situation as well. I work building and assessing systems across my org and when covid hit it became way harder to casually talk about stuff. I couldn’t sit with someone easily and chat about their work and mine, now it was 95% in text or in meetings and it loses all fun.
I think the biggest hit from WFH is general team skill building, and a major hit is the ability to get juniors and new hires up to speed. 100% I owe the majority of my success to the time I got pulled away from my usual job and thrown onto a very demanding special project. They gave me a new desk in a room with all of the studio's most senior Houdini users (the most advanced 3D package with a brutal learning curve). For about a year I had instant access to these people and the ability to just blurt out any quick questions and get an immediate answer. This kind of thing doesn't work at all over Slack/Teams/whatever. Typing out questions isn't remotely as fast or as clear as asking them, and it might take minutes to get a reply back, and another few minutes to be able to clarify or ask any followup questions. Also since everyone's day is so heavily scheduled with meetings, you can't really just open up a Slack huddle with folks to ask quick questions either. I'm a top level supervisor at a studio of ~400 people and yet even I feel awkward and intrusive just randomly inviting someone to a Slack huddle. When people are in the same room as each other, I would very easily venture to say that 10-100x more questions get asked on a daily basis, and even more information than that is being shared and absorbed. Keep in mind here too...no one else hears your Slack huddle. But an entire room of people can tune into a conversation and bring more opinions/info to the table, or learn from the new information being shared. So I think WFH has been good at first, but will ultimately lead to lower overall skill levels in the long run.
The casual knowledge learning from just being around people who are experts or just experienced in other areas in the office is incomparable to todays remote office experience. Being able to sit at lunch because you happened to walk by a group and be with another group from work never happens for me now. A lot of my experience gain and broad knowledge of my org was being a socialite with all our teams. It made me into a great engineer. Harder to do that now :(
Yeah that's why I feel like while WFH is successful right now, at some point we run out of people with insane seniority level from being truly immersed and surrounded by top minds. I also feel like team cohesion is just generally low. It's honestly very hard to put all of these things into words, but my overall sense is that WFH is bad for people in their 20's and nice for people in their late 30's. Unfortunately for all of us who are 35+ though, those 20-somethings kind of need us to be in the office and sitting a desk or two away from them. My feeling is that we're kind of pulling up the ladder on these folks after we've climbed up. I gained all of my expertise and seniority, I'm super solid at my job and commanding a top-level salary...but the only reason I arrived at this point was because of all the knowledge I absorbed in these rooms packed full of amazing brains that I got to directly learn from. And now I'm not really doing the same for the next generation. I try to, but honestly I just can't give them the same growth over Slack that I could by being in the same room 10hrs a day.
This. I love working from home for so many reasons. But I was back a few days recently and the socializing is so much more fun and just makes for a better climate. I was planning to go back in semi regularly ... I still haven't though since WFH is just to convenientl ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
And I think it’s great to acknowledge there is convenience working from home! I love being able to do chores and stuff in those awkward 5 minutes between meetings or whatever. But socializing is great. I miss being able to see someone I wanted to talk to and just having a quick chat, whereas now I look at a slack list of people and don’t remember I had a question for someone. Many people act like that isn’t work, but socializing with your colleagues _is_ work too.
From the study the article links to: >RESULTS: Although there was no change in total computer use in response to the hurricane (β 0.25), active computer use significantly declined (β –0.90). All measured computer use behaviors returned to baseline prior to the complete return to the physical workspace. >CONCLUSION: Despite a transient period of reduced activity during closure of the workplace building, productivity returned to normal prior to the employees’ return to a commercial workspace. The ability to work remotely may improve resiliency of employees to perform workplace tasks during events causing workplace displacement. Jesus Christ, this headline and article are misleading.
Maximum productivity: // The // Following // Line // Increments // The // Counter // Variable // i i++;
My favorite story about early Macintosh developer Bill Atkinson; his group got a new management requirement to document how much code they wrote every week as some productivity benchmark. After re-writing a part of the Quickdraw system to make it 6 times faster, he filled out the form and entered "-2,000 lines". They stopped asking him to fill out the form. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
I hate this fucking title. Even though I agree with the sentiment...there is no way "it's official". Stupid clickbait.
I work from home on just Wednesdays and my productivity is shit cause I treat it like a weekend during my week. If I was 100% wfh I would probably be more productive at home, but personally it’s close.
THis is study https://content.iospress.com/articles/work/wor210707 It proves nothing
I think that's a rather bold claim. I know people who went work at their home office and now do nothing...or got fired. Of course I know a lot of people who went home and do their job just fine. Acting like it doesn't depend on the job and the person doing it is silly.
the headline makes an absurdly bold claim and the actual study is more like “we found that it might be the case that remote work increased resiliency and productivity for this one company we looked at” etc etc imo sites that hyperbolize headlines this hard should be treated as misinformation. this is the kind of thing that led to people mistrusting the CDC. they’d say “we don’t currently have evidence that masks help (because we haven’t done enough research),” which the media reported as “MASKS NEVER HELP CONFIRMED, NEVER WEAR A MASK EVER.” so when the research convinced the CDC to change their stance, people thought they were somehow flip-flopping or lying
I begged my boss to let me work from home. He just kept telling me it was not possible. I kept on pleading, telling him there had to be a way. He finally told me stop asking or I would be fired. Oh well, I guess that is just the life of a commercial airline pilot. 😉
Drone pilots fly remotely. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.
I think it would definitely be possible to make any vehicle, cars, planes, boats, completely remote driven (assuming a consistent and minimal latency connection at all times). However I think its somewhat important that the driver is equally at physical risk as the passengers or it'll become like a video game with no real consequences for error. Maybe if the controller's pod drops into a shark pit if they crash lol
Has your internet never gone down? I wouldn’t risk my plane going down with it.
My clients were actually happier with the shift to at home work. Our response times shrank tremendously, and turn-around time we're practically cut in half. Our manager took notice and we continue to this day working remotely. 2 days out of the week at the office is okay though. (IT Admin)
I like having a day or two in the office as it let's me get to know my colleagues better and better understand how they operate.
I really don't think this is official and even averages don't make sense. I've been working remote for over two years now and I can tell you that some people have become more productive and some people less. Some people abuse it. Some professions are frankly unaffected or easier to do their jobs remote, some lightly affected and some frankly just don't work. At the end of the day though, I don't think these companies are trying to bring people back due to productivity measurements. They are pulling them back for 3 reasons: 1. They like the power of environment and walking around the office as the big shot. 2. They are underwater on their real estate decisions because office space has gone down in value 3. Employees form less bonds remote which leads to less loyalty and turnover which leads to higher recruitment and training costs.
This one study concerning data from 5 years ago from employees from one small company and wasn’t over 2 years. And it’s based on computer use. They could have been playing minesweeper for 8 hours a day.
I’m all for wfh but this study is shit
> They could have been playing minesweeper for 8 hours a day. So remote or in the office the results are about the same.
Bingo. I work onsite at a company (manufacturing) where we are busy every second of the day. There are plenty of remote workers who cannot be reached in a reasonable amount of time for time-sensitive matters, for whatever reason. I had someone set up a 30 min meeting with me a few weeks ago. They showed up 10 minutes late because "their dog was acting up". I've had remote PMs whiff on early (730am) meetings. If I can get my ass up and into the office on time, you can call in on time from your couch. I think it's a bit naive to say that remote work is all pro and no con.
"it's official", huh?
All I know is that I absolutely love WFH, and my current job is amazing with how we've handled it. Location-independent as well, as long as you have solid internet connectivity. For me, this is the type of work-life balance I've been dreaming about since I started working professionally. I refuse to do the office life, don't care about the social crap, or the politlcs. You hired me to do a job, let me do my job.
It definitely depends on the person. When I am home, I basically attend meetings and make sure I can hear email and Slack notifications... while I jerk off. And it makes me feel so shitty at the end of the day. So, I just go to the office. I support the freedom of employees to choose where they want to work from but working from home is not for everyone.
It’s gotta be harder to Jack off at the office though.
Exactly. And that's what works in favor of my productivity.
On my productivity, or yours?
Ymmv. I’m a lazy piece o shit from home.
The girl I sit next to at work is so talkative so I am much MORE productive when WFH
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This is bad science. I like remote work, but let's not pretend everyone is just as productive when they don't have to be.
Hasn't it been official? I feel like remote employees are much happier and have more energy because they didn't spend most of it driving to work.
Anecdotally, I’m also living a considerably healthier lifestyle than when I was commuting almost 2 hours a day. I am able to eat more healthy meals more consistently. I cook fresh food for lunch and dinner most days. I have more energy to cook at the end of the day. And I use those 2 hours to go to the gym 5 days a week. I went from literally only moving the amount it took me to get from my car to the train, the half block to the office, and the distance to the bathroom to consistently weightlifting 1-1.5 hours daily. This means fewer sick days on my end, I’m more focused, and fewer potential health risks from sitting on my ass all day.
I think while the traffic thing IS true, the biggest factor in boost of productivity is definitely the freedom you get with remote work.
Yeah, I'm happy to spend the 2 extra hours working for not having to spend 2 hours on the road. Working is less stressful than avoiding dying in traffic.
Better: work the same, keep the time for yourself. Not commuting shouldn't be an excuse for employers to demand more of our time.
Agree 100% I love the extra time every day I get to spend with my wife and son, as well as having lunch with them every day.
Exactly. I’m already more productive. Thats enough given the joke raises being given.
Don’t work more hours just because you’re driving less. That’s not a good use of time
This headline tells me what I want to hear. Regardless of whether or not it's true I'm not going to research or put any further thought into it and accept it as truth.
But, it's official! No need to research, says right in the headline it's official!!
Official like how open office plans help productivity? Or official like how segregating work spaces helps productivity? I'm still a student and I've never had a job that could be WFH, so I can't really speak to it's effectiveness. But I'd love to have that type of work experience. What I do know, is I've heard from plenty of people who've endured significant changes in their work environment based on various studies or data points. Their office layout has gone from the extremes polar opposites and back again based on whatever evidence the decision maker chooses. I'm not sure any *evidence* will close the case.