If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.

Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving.

And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?

Humans aren't automatons.

Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them.

But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.

If I found out one of my employees was using their office as a social lounge while working at my company, you better believe it would result in a conversation and possible revocation of their on-site privileges, forcing them to work in solitude at home instead so I could see real results.

If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.

Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.

> In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

"Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.

Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:

1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;

2) Sat back in thought a lot;

3) Spoke with my colleagues.

I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.

This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.

And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.

Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.

People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.

The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

Are you suggesting that people should have worked directly on production servers instead of using the VPN to work in a development environment?

Someone whose job pertains to operations does the bulk of their daily work on actual production hosts, for instance. Some tools (like the bug tracker) also didn't require use of the VPN.

Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?

...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time.

Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.