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joecasson | 2 years ago

Any sources to back up the second statement? It doesn't match up with my experience.

FWIW, I've worked from home since 2020 for a company that is remote friendly. We've had employees that want to work from home but they don't do very much work when they do. Doesn't go for everyone but it's my anecdotal experience.

discuss

toomuchtodo|2 years ago

There is well over $100b in enterprise value in remote first companies. Are they not productive? It seems like they very much are.

Examples (non exhaustive list in no particular order) that came to mind: AirBnB, Allstate Insurance (divested from their Chicago headquarters), Automattic, Dropbox, GitHub, Gitlab, Hashicorp, PagerDuty, Zapier

How much work someone accomplishes is a function of effective management and objective measurement, not where they sit. If you have to sit over someone’s shoulder for the work to get done, you’ve already failed. Your hiring system is optimizing for autonomous folks who can operate in unstructured work ideally. People who don’t want to work can do that equally well from both home or the office.

https://builtin.com/awards/fully-remote/2023/best-places-to-...

(remote for a decade as both IC and leadership of team of ~10, including a tenure at a fully remote org)

abhinavk|2 years ago

That has everything to with the employees. WFH is just the excuse.

One thing about WFH is that it exposes such employees. In office, it's easy to look busy and blend in. In fact, you just realized this only now and not when they were in office tells all about it.

medvezhenok|2 years ago

There are some cases, like ADHD where body doubling actually helps productivity. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in office productivity was higher for those people.

I also think ADHD is significantly more prevalent among software engineers (mostly inattentive type) in my experience. My random guess would be close to 25 percent:)

jemmyw|2 years ago

Did they do a lot of work when they came into the office?

mklepaczewski|2 years ago

Some of them were more productive when they worked in an office. I'm 3-4x more productive when I work beside someone.

In discussions about WFH/RTO, people are usually split into two groups: the ones who work well unsupervised and those who want to slack off. There's the third group - the ones that want to work but are unable to do it due to chronic procrastination issues (which are often caused by ADD/ADHD ).