[danny_sf45]

The only reason for me to not go back to the office is: fixed working hours. Sure, my contract says I have to work 40h/week, but I just can't. If I'm at the office, I would probably work (focused) around 4 or 5 hours. The rest is "wasted" with: chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff), breaks... but I have to be there for 8 hours no matter what. At home, I can work those 4 or 5 hours (focused) and call it a day. I don't have to pretend I'm working, I just close the laptop.

Same outcome (for the company), less (wasted) hours for me. This is impossible to achieve if one has to go to the office. (can you imagine entering at 9am and leaving at 2pm while telling everybody: "hey, I cannot work anymore, I'm only able to work focused 5 hours per day. See you tomorrow!".)

[hinkley]

I have basically stopped eating lunch.

I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5.

What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.

[freehunter]

I started on a remote-only team about 6 years ago. For half of that time our only chat system was a 1-to-1 and you could do group chats but had to explicitly invite people and they had to accept. When we switch to Slack (although Teams or Riot or open source would have worked too) and had always-on chat rooms, things changed dramatically.

Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.

[rdtsc]

After 5 years or so working remote I noticed a few of the same things:

* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.

* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.

* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.

* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.

All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.

To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.

To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.

> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.

There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.

[kerkeslager]

You recognize the problem, now fix it.

Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.

As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.

[t-writescode]

I strongly recommend ‘random’ rooms in your shared chat messenger, or a way to make random rooms in whatever communication infrastructure you have. They’re vital for maintaining social interactions

[swensel]

Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.

[ghaff]

When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)

[simlevesque]

I did this very often for a long time.

[Fishysoup]

I think the need for an office depends a lot on the type of work that needs to be done. If you're working in R&D or science, for example, it's really (really) hard to make much progress alone, without people bouncing ideas around, showing you how things work, whiteboards, etc.

Sure, you could do some of that on zoom, but the psychology of it is very different, and the spontaneous component of it is gone completely. It's awkward to slack someone with "hey do you want to talk about some ideas i have, using the awkward zoom annotation tool?". They'll probably say yes, but then other people who might have something interesting to contribute (or learn) will not be present. Also the feeling of interacting with people via videochat is weird, especially if you're new to the workplace.

Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; b) human beings around you who work on similar things; and c) a sense of community. I realize that many workplaces are toxic and don't offer any good versions of b) or c), and working remotely could be better then (though a better idea would be to find a new employer if you can). But, though many people are thriving in this new work-from-home environment, equally many or more are suffering.

Also, regarding the 4-5 hours of productivity a day: yeah! There's been a lot of studies on this, and some countries/companies have been experimenting with 4 day work-weeks or shorter workdays. There's definitely progress to be made there.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home;

This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation.

Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode.

Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.

[allenu]

You're right that the spontaneity is missing. Everything has to become formalized in some capacity to ensure everyone knows what's up as well.

Just recently I noticed that my coworkers were all jumping into a slack thread. It was a thread that was active hours earlier but that I missed out on, so I couldn't put in my input. If this was in the office, the fact that everyone was having a big conversation would be a signal to turn around and engage in it, but in the virtual world, someone has to specifically @ you to have you join, or else create a formal meeting to discuss it.

The small connections that grease the wheels of communication are gone or are more challenging when you have to do them over Slack or video call.

[dasudasu]

I really don't understand this. In a cubicle farm environment, you'd walk over their desk, interrupt whatever they are doing, and ask them to follow you to a separate meeting room to use the whiteboard? And how are other people supposed to contribute if you close the door in order not to disturb anyone in the radius of this meeting room?

I found that it's much less awkward to hit them up on collaborative tools. Meetings are also much easier to spin since you don't have to herd people into a single room and convince them as hard to use their limited time on this meeting since they can just do something else in the background if they're not in another one.

[tomc1985]

Text chat is amazing. Maybe growing up in the heyday of chat services has made it feel natural to me, but I don't understand these complaints about how people don't feel like they can connect emotionally etc etc.

Do you need to do these interactions over Zoom? Or is it habit?

It's like, if you can connect with a book, you can connect over chat. It's just words.

[mc32]

The most productive workers barely scrape 50% productivity; however, idle, chat, socialization and other “wasteful” time isn’t wasted. You learn things about the needs of other groups, colleagues, the politics and all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.

[baron_harkonnen]

> all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.

When people say these things I seriously question if they've ever worked remote before. Yes if being remote makes you atypical for your workplace, then you'll probably be left out. But if you're working for a remote-first team the it's completely different. Nearly all of my closest coworkers I've met have been at remote companies.

I have had tons of interesting conversations, brainstorming session and just generally fun discussion while remote.

Honestly, I have personally found the amount of more toxic conversations also drops when remote. The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like (working with people you don't like is fine, but having to have conversations with them, go out for team drinks with them etc is another thing). This leads to generally more toxic behavior, since you have to put more energy into those social interactions.

[rightbyte]

Political power play doesn't work out as easily remotely. Social manipulations is harder. That is my observation.

[zwayhowder]

Would love to read any research that backs that number. (I'm not saying you're not right, I just like reading research papers).

[katbyte]

I'd rather spend that time on other things tbh

[phendrenad2]

Also some teams practice "watercooler-based development". Requirements and coding standards are passed by word-of-mouth. Being remote in an environment like that effectively means you're cut off from key knowledge required to do your job.

[ericmcer]

Also going by parents idea that completing a task is the end of your workday, any socialization is eating into your free time. The entire thing has added stress as you race towards completion each day

[throwaway894345]

I would be very interested to hear more about these claims if you can share a link.

[danny_sf45]

I agree that the socialization part is not actually "wasted" time and I would love to do it as much (or as little) as I want per week (ideally one or two days, instead of five days per week on a forced basis).

[Nition]

I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home. I've always tracked my time even when working from home to make sure I'm doing the amount of hours I'm getting paid for.

If this person was contracted to achieve a certain amount of work done I'd totally understand, but they're contracted based on time. Kinda surprised how positive the Hacker News crowd is towards skipping work for up to 50% of contracted time. I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.

[PragmaticPulp]

> I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home.

In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment.

> I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.

It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world.

Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week.

In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly.

[themarkn]

The person does the same amount of work at home that they do in the office, because when being in an office there is a normal background level of distraction, socializing, breaks etc that interfere with the person’s work, causing them to only be productive for 5 of the 8 hours. But those “unproductive” hours were paid as part of the expected 40. They are still in essence paid as part of the 40. This person’s output for the company is the same (if not better). Lost time from friction caused by office life is restored. BUT spending that restored time on work can be suboptimal. Eg if I push too fast, I sometimes make subtle mistakes that are time consuming to undo. Or I get out of step with coworkers and have to find a way to cool my heels anyway. People are positive about this because the worker is happier and more effective at the job, whilst reclaiming some hours, and contributing at the same level as always, which deep down is what the company is buying with their forty hours - a certain contribution of work per week.

[Retric]

People are paid to be available to do 40 hours a week of work, not to actually do 40 hours of work a week. Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start etc still counts as work because you’re on the companies time not your own.

That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.

[nugget]

Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.

[PenguinCoder]

Paid salary, work hourly? There's no sense in that for the employee.

Get your work done. That's what Salary used to, and should mean. Takes you 20? Good. Takes you 60? Too bad; get it done.

[klipt]

> contracted to work 40 hours/wk

That's not how salaried positions work in the US. If you work 60 hour weeks you don't get paid overtime (but if that helps you perform beyond your peers, you might get promoted faster).

What matters is performance, not hours.

[raz32dust]

Companies typically don't pay for hours worked but fo the value that is delivered. It's common to see people work a lot more than 40 hrs a week as well without overtime, and this is legal as per most employment contracts.

If you are a freelancer billing hours, then yes, I agree it would not be ethical. But still it's somewhat of a gray area. In theory, you should be able to raise your hourly rate to compensate for the fact that you can get more done in less time. But in practice, you might not get any clients if you advertise a higher than usual hourly rate, at least until you build a reputation.

[whyhow]

If my company could lower the cost of its product by half and still make the same yearly revenue, it would. And all the executives would get huge bonuses.

[dakiol]

I think I've expressed myself wrongly. I'm not a contractor, just a normal fulltime employee. This normally means (at least in Europe) 8h/day 5 times per week, hence 40h/week. I'm not being payed by the hour.

[Mvandenbergh]

Most HN readers probably regard the concept for being contracted to work for a certain number of hours (rather than achieving certain outputs) with inherent contempt anyway so they're not going to be upset about turning one into the other.

[peteretep]

Are you a programmer?

[Polylactic_acid]

I feel the same. For the last 3 hours of the day I just state at my screen in zombie mode. With wfh when I start to feel braindead I just lay in bed for 15 minutes and when I come back I feel refreshed for the rest of the day. With no pressure to look like you are constantly working you can do what works best since no one can see more than your output at the end of the week.

[wil421]

Someone I heard recently phrased it very well:

“I don’t want to spend 2 hours driving a day to do 4 hours of work.”

[orwin]

Yes, i'm the same. And if you're like me, i suppose sometime, in high pressure situation, you can easily work 10 hours straight. Doing this at the office is impossible, doing this home is easy (if it stay exceptional). I'm more productive home than i was at the office, and this is really surprising for me ( i assumed i was just a slacker).

[cuddlecake]

I've had one of the most productive days yesterday, because my internet went off.

Went on a berserk coding spree from 1PM to 1AM with some small breaks in between. Completely cut off from any distraction, I was able to concentrate.

Willpower and discipline are nice, but real restrictions that are impossible to circumvent are better, at least for me.

[hesdeadjim]

Guess I must be wired differently, but I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”, rather than “I’m convinced this is the output required of me, thus I will do no more with my new found time.” shrug

[danny_sf45]

Sure, if you can do more go for it. I just can't: my brain is tired, my eyes hurt, I cannot produce any productive output/outcome.

[antisthenes]

> I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”

If I don't have equity in the company, my interest in that is exactly 0.

[Aeolun]

I think it’s generally more related to a lot of time that’s wasted having ad-hoc conversations with people.

[birdyrooster]

I don’t tell my coworkers when I do this but at Apple we are adults and can go to the bathroom without permission. You can come and go as you wish, that notwithstanding the waste of colocating with and/or commuting to an office. I want virtual reality so I can be in shared spaces for impromptu conversation and coworking.

(Edit: I really don’t miss my boomer/genx coworkers jamming out to hair metal)

[nmjohn]

FWIW, for a long time I've worked roughly 11 to 4 and have not caught any flack for it, as I get my work done. It entirely depends on the company you work for. (I'm not saying my situation is common, just that it does exist.)

[war1025]

Figured I'd chime in and say that I'm basically in the same situation.

I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle.

My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day"

Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit.

The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.

[mavelikara]

> chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff)

> ...

> Same outcome (for the company),

What if the company cares for those non-work stuff - for example, some of those chats being a mentoring conversation?

[Koshkin]

A mentoring conversation is actually (or should be seen as) work stuff.

[modzu]

then there are those of us with kids and so's around. i can barely get a bloody thing done and for one can't wait to go back!

[mac01021]

I can't get any work done with my kid around either. But the difference is not that I'm home instead of at the office. The difference is that she's at home instead of at school.

[dijit]

Not sure why you're being downvoted, being without children (or having a dedicated space outside of the home) is important.

Kids don't understand time or space boundaries very well, and will interrupt your focus, your meetings, your work in general.

I have a colleague with kids and he was the first to volunteer back to the office.. I am without kids and I never want to go back.

This works out decently well, because he's alone: thus, safer than if we all came back.

But the issue is if there was more people in the office, then they would make decisions which the rest of us are not privy to.

[alluro2]

Same here - I don't have a separate room for work (never needed it) and have 2 pre-school kids at home. Average period without interruption: 10 minutes. I do so little "real" work during the day, that I need 4-5 hours at night to catch up...My wife doesn't work for a longer time now, so there's not a lot of understanding from her side - if I complain, I'm considered a drama queen and I only care about work...If this keeps up, I'll have to rent another small apartment or find another solution.

[y2bd]

Isn’t this more of an issue of school being out? Would your kids going back to school solve this issue?

[Koshkin]

Looks like nobody else wants to admit that.

[ericmcer]

I have been struggling with this a bit. It is kinda like the “unlimited PTO!” phenomenon where it is honor system based but can trick more work out of people. It is difficult to prove 8 hours of engineering work so the stress of my week can vary wildly based accuracy of estimates and how desperate I am to prove my skills haha.

[cel1ne]

I have worked for many years as a software-developer and found that more than 5 effective hours per day are impossible or at least not sustainable.

30-32 hours per week is perfect. More is just useless.

I have heard that this seems to be true for most intellectual work that requires concentration (5 hours daily max). No sources on that, though.

[ashtonkem]

One of the best realities for WFH is that one doesn’t have to pretend to work after burning out for the day.

[schwartzworld]

I'm a developer and pre-covid typically only stayed in the office until 2pm most days (lunch with the team, work for an hour then leave). I would tell everybody that I was going to work from home the rest of the day. Nobody ever cared. this is the future I dream of for all of us.

[jermaustin1]

This is basically the same for me, plus the commute. The office manager doesn't get in until 8-9am and he was the only person who could unlock the office, and would leave around 5:30pm, meaning if you want lunch away from the office, you aren't going to hit 40 hours per week.

Where as now, I start my day around 6-7am (I wake up "early" every morning), I try and quit around 4pm, and take a 1-2 hour lunch sometime between the two. This schedule is only possible working from home. I now hit 40 hours per week week every single week that I work all 5 days, where as before I would hit 30 hours. And even weeks where I only work 4 days, I still hit ~35 hours after shrinking my lunch.

[rafaelvasco]

I feel exactly like this. I can work , focused at most 4 hours every day. After that, I want to stand up and go running because my legs are killing me. So home office is heaven. When I'm done I'm done.

[bargl]

But the outcome isn't the same for the company.

I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine.

Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge.

Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office.

I've been trying to replicate that at home more.

[everly]

I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.

Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.

[systematical]

Or actually work the full 8-ish hours a day Mon-Thurs and call it an early Friday by noon.

[ipiz0618]

Glad to see I'm not the only one..I wrote a script that records (manually) how much time I am able to focus each day, and it averages around 5 hours. On the days when I have to work overtime, it'd be around 6.5 hours.

[alexashka]

I can easily imagine being judged based on my output, not my etiquette.

It'd reveal most people to be largely about etiquette, largely useless if not outright harmful in terms of output if contemplated a little.

Most software jobs are re-implementing the same shit another company has already done. It's worse than useless - sipping tequila on the beach would actually be a net benefit for humanity - it'd alleviate stress, tension, traffic, hubris, carbon footprint among other things.

If contemplated a little more - most jobs are enabling this insane rat race and the immense infrastructure around it, which nobody individually is really that interested in continuing.

It's like religion or circumcision - we do and believe things and we don't even know why - most would be better off not knowing and not believing - just give them tequila and a beach :)