Gaius,

Studies are mixed on the pros/cons of office vs remote. For example a Stanford study showed productivity increased 9 to 13% for remote office workers. Some have shown that collaboration can increase as well as communication was more intentional (I don't remember the study offhand).

Anyways, point is it's not all or nothing and the data is still out on effectiveness and efficiency (I'd think it also depends on the nature of the work etc)

Totally depends on the person IMO... We have one day a week we work from home... I find myself producing more that day than the rest combined.

Others on the team function differently

And on the role.

Compare:

1. A role which requires very little communication with the rest of team and quite a lot of long, uninterrupted concentration.

E.g. a developer working a long time on some internally intricate sub-system which has well-defined interfaces to the rest of the system.

2. E.g. a UX designer (or perhaps a product manager) who needs to talk to many people, whose projects shift quickly, whose work affects many other people's work, etc.

UX design of customer facing systems would actually benefit most from remote work. The UX designer should create a company wide blog (or similar) showing off the current iteration of the design, along with reasons why each design element is included.

This is far better than simply talking to many people 1 to 1. It creates a written history indicating why each design element was chosen. It allows stakeholders to understand the requirements behind a particularly strange UX choice and allows them to give suggestions for better UX in a way that takes those requirements into account. Iteration can be faster as comments can be taken from all sides at the same time instead of having to seek people out and set up meetings.

I only see positives for a UX designer given the nature of their work is highly visual, functional and is cross-organizational. In fact, I think any company NOT doing UX design this way is probably being inefficient?

Given how much we know at this point of the utter questionability of studies in the social and psychological sciences, I don't think it's at all productive to make this kind of point.

Sad but true.

No, much of Silicon Valley these days is for making cookie-cutter mobile social apps and the like.

>If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for.

Maybe that's not what Silicon Valley is for, in some grand cosmic sense, but I'd require some convincing that it isn't what Silicon Valley actually mostly does.

Fine, but this supposed benefit is _easily_ negated by the huge problem of employees leaving the Bay Area due to costs, trying to rehire, inflated salaries for cost of living, etc.

Our new management came in with "no more remote!", but then trying to keep up with what SV is "for" has been a giant hassle and destroyed ability to deliver.