From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_:
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work.
Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
> but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app.
Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
Keep your eyes open for a better job? The work you do should have impact of some kind. In the corporate world there is business impact (increase revenue, decrease direct costs or improve system efficiency), social impact (make a product that directly helps people in some way), or personal impact (work on something that you find intrinsically interesting or helps you grow your skills or understanding).
I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
I had an office with a door multiple times in my (early) career. An open office door is a universe away from sitting in an open office. Even when everyone has their doors open, a true office setup allows for plenty of focus.
On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again.
Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on
Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking.
Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused.
Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).
When I was piecing together how I got to be a relatively young lead developer, it came down to my open door policy. I essentially rediscovered Hamming's wisdom just by extending a policy that started with my college roommate who was struggling with our CS homework. That lead to me helping other kids in the computer lab (with C/C++ bugs, not with the algorithms), and if you have skills at <5YOE you're going to use them at work if you can, because what else can you do to not look like a newb?
But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role.
Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.
Seems very simple, working more with people than with problems gets you more social capital; people gonna remember someone helping them with something relatively trivial directly more than "they saw a bunch of code commited regularly".
Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.
Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.
Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.
Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
The principle applies to a world where people work in offices doing serious long term R&D work. The quote is entirely irrelevant to people in working open offices for projects that change direction quarterly building features designed to make PMs look busy.
This feels so pretentious. People can keep it closed or open for whatever reason they want, and it has no correlation to how they solve problems or learn.
Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.
> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that
Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.
Also:
> 10 years
Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..."
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas.
Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.
Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.
All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
Not to simplify too much, but I think it comes down to accountability and responsibility.
I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that.
I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.
One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further.
There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.
@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
Where do companies otherwise prioritize long-run development over short-term output? In my experience, generally nowhere. So why would this make managers push RTO more?
Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.
I think this will do exactly nothing for RTO, neither increase nor decrease the push from management.
The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.
Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.
Because the C-suite needs to justify those 15-year commercial leases, and anything with a veneer of credibility will be used to do so (in addition to simply firing people who don't comply).
I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.
> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
Is my remote experiences strange or do other remote workers not have some sort of chat where people ask if you've got a minute and drop in a video conference link if they need a quick chat on something?
No idea, but yes, that's exactly how we do it. We've been full remote since COVID and honestly, I don't think any of us would want it any other way but we're a very small team so not representative of larger trends.
This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:
1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,
2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),
3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,
4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and
5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.
Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.
The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.
In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.
That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.
The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...
In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.
As for the code review data they analyzed:
"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed-
back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow-
up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase
in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the
online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "
I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.
Nobody's stopping you from commuting an hour each way into a beige box with the coldest fluorescent lighting ever. If you really want to inhale someone else's rhinovirus, by all means, be my guest! Just don't force me to do the same.
> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office.
Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
Off-the-shelf AI can replace workers in their twenties and AI fine-tuned over a few months for your company's needs can replace workers in their forties. Problem solved!
If an alien was reading many of the comments here, before they knew much about the world, they’d probably first believe that working from office is this new fangled idea that had never existed before.
Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc.
Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way.
This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.
The thing is that office can be very different environment. I have my own office at current workplace. But I was sitting in 20 seat open office too. People were hiding in the toilets to do some coding…
During COVID, studies supporting working from home leading to higher productivity were highlighted. Now when companies want people to come back, studies supporting working in an office producing higher productivity are highlighted. Funny how that works and this post is already 100+ points.
*cant wait to see those down votes for this comment
Kind of wild that people don't just do both. Let your reports who want to sit in traffic commute to the office, and let the ones who don't want to do that work from home. Problem freakin' solved. Where's my Nobel prize?
Readit News
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas.
Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.
Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again.
Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on
Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking.
Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused.
Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).
But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role.
Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.
This makes me think of people hanging out on Slack. But then the interruptions are constant if you keep an eye on it.
Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.
How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.
Sure, there might be lots of confounding factors, and it might not be causation at all. That's why the quote is from a speech, not a paper
Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.”
Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.
Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.
Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners?
Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.
Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.
> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that
Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.
Also:
> 10 years
Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
"psychics": pun intended? ;-)
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
It's not complicated how teams should be located physically, but corporations refuse to learn and try to reinvent something every time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.
Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.
All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that.
I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.
@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"
full text:
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.
The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.
Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.
> Proximity [office] *increases* development
Do you seriously expect managers to read anything beyond title?
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
So how come those who can handle it are being punished?
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
Or hoard
1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,
2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),
3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,
4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and
5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.
Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.
The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.
In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.
The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...
In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.
As for the code review data they analyzed:
"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "
I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.
Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?
Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc.
Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way.
This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.
*cant wait to see those down votes for this comment