I have a feeling a lot of value is created during casual lunch conversations.
I was a wfh maximalist like many on this thread at the very beginning of my career, but AFAICT it just comes from some combination of a) being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work and didn't need to communicate cross-team much or b) having work that doesn't require much creative collaboration. As I got more senior and moved towards different types of problems, my appreciation for the value of (though I still do enjoy and make time for WFH).
For those who say that Slack or email or VC are perfect substitutes: there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication. Get good enough at running meetijgs of more than two people and you realize how much of the task of efficiently running a meeting involves reading micro-expressions and pauses to pick up on cues that help you direct the conversation (not to mention having n points of failure in a VC being accessed by n network connections). My team has been remote for a week and I've already noticed good meeting runners have worse meetings and bad meetings runners have even worse meetings.
Not exactly the most productive WFH conditions.
Most Junior engineers aren't working remotely. I've been working remotely for a decade with different companies and almost all of the developers on my teams have been mid-level to senior. The junior developers always struggled and had so many roadblocks, it made working remotely difficult.
It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.
Our meetings regularly have 10+ people from different departments.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know what field you're in or the structure of your company, so I don't want to hazard a guess as to the difference. But the majority of the time I call a meeting, it's to have a fairly complex, dynamic conversation for which the communication bandwidth of Slack/email/GDoc is too low (otherwise we'd stick with async/chat). This means that few meetings consist of conversations that're fairly predictable. Which means the person running the meeting needs to know when to cut a conversation off or let it continue, what direction to take the conversation, pick up on silent hesitancy or disagreement from any of the ten people in the room, etc etc etc. I can go on and on about the techniques I've seen people use to run extremely effective meetings, as well as how poorly-run meetings don't use them. As mentioned, these rely on visual and timing cues that humans use to communicate, sometimes unconsciously. (I'm keenly aware of good and bad meetings because I hate meetings)
Only for people who can't read.
If you seriously think written text is as communicative as face to face communication, I would consider being evaluated by a professional for a social interaction disorder of some sort.
Of course, you could learn to write better and convey the same information over text.
Of course there’s still noise. Just like in text. Professional writers struggle just as hard to get their word choice and phrasing -just so-.
I'm looking forward to AR/VR taking over more cake of the need for physical needs.
Non-verbal communication is a huge part of social (and this includes work) interactions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_(computing)
Here's some information on terms you're clearly unfamiliar with that I used in the part you quoted. In the future I suggest you try and understand the words you're reading _before_ making a fool of yourself, but you do you. Hope that helps!
Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.
I find almost all meetings to be a waste of time. Maybe 1:1s are the exception, but they're also pretty much optional - good to have a catch up with team members sometimes but if someone can't make it that day no big deal.
The problem with meetings is that a well run meeting needs to have an agenda and ideally written minutes, I don't think anyone disputes that (except for casual 1:1 catch-ups which don't). So you end up writing anyway, or wish someone had. Without the writing aspect meetings are often poorly disciplined, achieve little, run over and end with an agreement to organise another meeting.
In the end, work - the production of useful artifacts customers will buy - gets done alone. It doesn't get done in meetings with colleagues.
I will be really happy when this is all over and I can just go into the office and not think about it.
My fear, being a proponent of distributed work, is that high-profile places will half-heartedly try it due to the current circumstances, declare it to be a failure, and take us two steps back.
There is an interesting idea here for companies to subsidize employees' home offices with all the money they're saving on not renting office buildings of their own, but that would make the housing crisis substantially worse and further increase hatred of tech. Imagine how badly rents would be driven up on apartments typically desired by families if you've got lots of single workers using work subsidies to get larger apartments than they actually needed.
If you can get 70-80% of the desirability for 50% of the cost (Boston would be like 80-90% and 60-70%, by my reckoning) while retaining 90% of the salary, and you make it perfectly acceptable on all sides to do so, a lot of people are gonna do that.
If I limited myself to the US, any state with zero state income tax, cheap land/housing, and mild winters would work. I lived in Florida for over a decade and would go back in a heartbeat if the job situation matched the Bay Area. A big suburban house near Las Vegas would be fine. Texas doesn’t seem bad either—lots of land!
Given that SF was not particularly appealing to live in 10 years ago, I think the story is more complicated.
My concern remains that companies who are doing this on the fly, due to an external influence, with employees who never signed up to be remote-first, with new, unfamiliar tools, and without the ingrained culture that a distributed-from-the-start company enjoys, will nonetheless tar us with the same brush when their experience turns out to be disappointing.
I'm sorry to hear the GP has to pay 3800 for a studio. I pay around 4400 for a 3 bed/3.5 bath townhouse w/ a 2 car garage in Chicago's suburbs; and I think what I pay is ridiculous.
Also, co-working spaces are no-go because of COVID-19 too, at least for now. So the current situation isn't so much WFH as it is WFQ, and co-working spaces don't meet that need either.
You’re assuming everyone works on the west coast....
The average square footage of a home in the US is 2600 square feet. (https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-s...) I would assume since most developers in most of the United States make more than the average for their market, they would be able to afford the average home. In my market (a major metropolitan city), any developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford a place with an extra room for an office.
We were renting a three bedroom, 2 bath apartment with an office four years ago in the most exclusive part of the city with the best school system for $1700/month. It’s still about the same price. We bought a brand new build 3200 square foot house (5 bedroom/3.5 bath house with a large separate office) and are paying $2150/month all in with 5% down and still live in a great school system.
[citation needed]
Just because your use case, and likely that of most of your friends, doesn't lend itself to having a home office, doesn't mean that other people, with different costs of living (esp in land price), will live the same way. If $3,800 got you 5 bedrooms instead of 1 and everything else stayed the same, it's possible you'd voluntarily choose to downsize, but it also seems possible you'd keep it, and have 1 bedroom, a home office each, a conference room, and a (shared) workshop. Or however else you wish you divide up the space. (Hint: children take up a lot of it.)
Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.
Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses. Taking a walk for more than an hour is impossible because there is nowhere to go to the bathroom, unless you want to do your business in someone's bush. There are no drinking fountains, and if you get hungry on your long walk, you're screwed. It can get (seriously) depressing, compared to cities, where most of the stuff you pass by on the street is generally open to walk into and explore, and food/water/restrooms are readily available.
By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.
> Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses.
That hasn't been my experience. There's lots of things to do in suburbs, you just need to drive there. The rest of your comment is about some difficulties of doing walks in suburbs, which are quite foreign to me -- for one thing, I'm quite sure that almost everywhere in Seattle metro area, you're not more than 1 hour walk from a convenience store. Given how millions of people love going hiking in places even further from convenience stores, gas stations and water fountains, I don't see this as such a huge problem. The rest of your complaints are simply matter of your preferences: I for one thing couldn't care less about presence of places to walk into and explore. I'm not a tourist in my own town, I need to get places and get things done, and idly walking around the business districts is not one of my hobbies.
This may be a US thing. I've lived in about 10 countries now (but not the US), and I hardly knew anyone who owned a car in any of them.
That can be hard for Europeans to wrap their head around. (I live here and am a car enthusiast and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.)
In the USA registration wildly varies by state and the actual stat is a quarter billion "vehicles" but in my state every non-rowboat boat is a registered vehicle (although essentially unenforced for small sailboats and inflatables) and every boat trailer is yet another vehicle and every RV is a registered license plated vehicle and every trailer and etc. My parents never owned more than one car although they had five "registered vehicles" at one point. Also any commercial vehicle that drives on public roads, in my state this includes SOME farm tractors and other farm equipment. Needless to say every motorcycle and moped is a registered vehicle, and in my municipality, resident bicycles are technically required to be registered although never enforced.
Nationwide there's about 70M "things that move and pay registration tax and are not cars" that are registered as vehicles. Very near one per adult.
As a check on the figures, note there's only 105M "housing units" in the USA, so when you see strange figures reported about 300M to 400M vehicles its obvious that the average house does not have four cars parked in front of it, and that figure includes scrapped cars in junkyards and railroad cars and minecarts and things like that.
Don't you have towns and villages in the US?
Are you European by chance? We have these things but they tend to be very spread out due to our wealth of land, especially so as you move further west. Further a lot of them have basically slowly turned into boring suburban sprawl.
Active urban space, sleepy suburbs, and country-living are pretty much your options in most of the US.
Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.
Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.
Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.
You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.
Until it isn't. That's the magic of the invisible hand at work. And when you can barely afford rent on a WFH-friendly apartment with work subsidies, think of all the regular families with non-tech salaries that can no longer dream of it.
My girlfriend and I both have a good number of meetings, which is incompatible with being in the same room as another person also yapping to their computer. When we both have meetings we need to be in a different room.
> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.
I pay roughly $30 per month in total transportation costs, so this is negligible. My $3,800 rent at least gets me an apartment within walking distance (and easy biking distance) of work.
Most people aren't digital nomads.
I'm only trying to argue against a common sentiment here on HN, that working from home is more productive.
My personal beliefs are that a single WFH day a week in most instances might be net-positive for the company.
I’ve never grown more or learned more from other people than in the last 13 months at a remote startup. Even if it all folds over tomorrow I’m better off because of the opportunity. I say all of this as someone who is vocal about the challenges of remote work here and among my friends and colleagues.
The first year was a struggle but after that I've been solid.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o...
https://www.bisnow.com/london/news/office/the-proof-is-here-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2018/08/16/open-off...
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313034
For the bonus:
Commuting is also pretty bad for productivity.
https://www.tlnt.com/how-commute-issues-can-dramatically-imp...
If you're just aqui-hiring or buying successful products what does that say about your internal culture? Are you super focused on only your primary product, or are the people you've hired kind of not "new product" innovative?
I guess a lot of people think Google/FB == innovation, and they are without a doubt highly innovative, but when it comes to products I'm not really sure that they are. I think most of their innovation comes from improving what they currently do, not really expanding into new markets or with new products.
Maybe I'm wrong? What do you think?
1) Innovation doesn't have to be in creating new products, and can very well be in incremental improvements to existing products.
2) "new products" also doesn't need to be externally visible. There could be lots of innovation but just for things that aren't visible to customers.
Netflix hasn't come out with a new product since streaming started. But there are definitely a lot of new things that are built that are at least arguably innovative.
See https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16949366/google-htc-smart...
This suggests they at least partially outsourced the work initially and then acqui-hired their way into in-housing it.
Though, yes, it is possible that some of it was done in-house from the beginning. Just because they leaned on external resources to some extent doesn't mean they developed no internal capability on their own.
Many employees are new to remote work, and are now distracted by the virus, changes in the workplace, etc. This leads to bottlenecks for anyone relying on upstream work, and there's a chain reaction. I'm waiting a lot longer for work correspondence and code reviews.
It's reasonable to be distracted right now -- doesn't seem too bad yet, but it's impossible to work at capacity with these factors.
And that's in a hard-charging company like Google. Other companies are worse: ~13 years ago I worked at Microsoft and we had a period where the team just didn't do any work at all, for like 2 months. Everyone still showed up and pretended to be busy AF, but nothing got done. Lots of meetings and watercooler conversations got done though. Lots of status reporting as well. By any traditional metric people appeared to be "productive". But nothing got done all the same.
If you're so disinterested in your work, you'll find a million ways to goof off in the office also. Just because you're there doesn't mean you'll be productive.
I've been WFH/cafés for the last six years. I have occasional off days but I'm way more productive at home over the long run, than at the office. At the office I often find that I seem to have had a full day but can't actually identify concrete outcomes. It was just a long series of meetings, chitchats, catch-ups, interruptions, and so on.
Whether it's amazing or terrible depends on execution (and obviously other things), and transitioning in a week makes it even harder. Lean on someone experienced.
People have been making coffee like this for centuries and continue to do so without a problem. It's a no-cost fixable situation you're in.
A symbiosis, if only temporary between the corporation and the employee.
Cue David Attenborough's voiceover.
I always work from home and I can see where his issues come from. I'm sure he'd do things differently if this were a permanent state for him.
Or perhaps he will finally be able to break the habit. Without coffee many (not all) are sleeping better and more rested. He may discover he is one of those people.
Switch coffee with donut. Or newspaper and it starts sounding like traveling an extra hour in doesn't make as much sense as biking/roller blading/walking or driving 5 minutes to grab that coffee.
But when people are worried about flu-like symptoms like headaches, fatigue, muscle aches and being out of breath might not be the optimal time :)
No but seriously, instant coffee ftw. There are coffee snobs and then there's getting the job done.
Productivity is ultimately going to be determined by how people actually behave, not how we believe they should behave. Not even by how they believe they should behave.
Really, he is giving up the benefits of specialization, which has uplifted mankind since the dawn of time.
(pod coffee with all its faults seems to be popular)
But in fairness for calling him out you have the most entitled statement ever read (until this message where I feel so entitled I call you out for calling him out)
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1237577750480740353?s=1...
But then again, it is sad that these days, mockery is the default way of discourse on the internet.
On the bright side, maybe it will do some good overall, because working from home is (IMO) clearly a good idea at the moment, and now people have a strawman villain they can fight against by supporting WFH policies.
You're being mocked because you're musing over the lack of luxury office amenities that many, many workers in the U.S. don't have.
And the fact your comment about needing to walk to Starbucks and actually do the dishes make you sound like a manchild.
People just hate tech workers and are looking for every reason to represent them as being entitled and out of touch.
But for me the problem is less anything you are doing, and more the implications of what you've said about Google (and other companies for that matter). The fact that employers are trying to remove so much of the "friction" of normal, human life to maximize time spent working is a bit dystopic. I mean, by the same logic, why not scrap the cafeteria and bathrooms for that matter, hook employees up to feeding tubes and catheters, so they literally never leave their desks?
Cooking, eating, meal cleanup, etc are a part of human life. If we are trying to streamline that, it should be for the extra comfort of the individual, not so that a company can keep them at the grindstone for even longer. So the argument that working from home causes decreases in productivity because employees have to care for themselves isn't actually an indictment against working from home, it's an indictment against the expectations of productivity that employers have.
Seriously, though, I hear you both for what you were actually doing (not really whining) and for how you are taking it. I personally have never been able to just let things roll off me,either (or, better yet, turn them into humor).
You have to admit, despite being the butt of the joke, it's pretty funny.
This is just part of being an adult. You can manage! You can get used to anything.
And is your work actually closer than Starbucks? I don't understand that one.
Let's hear your cooking tips, then. Preferrably no "microwave the plastic box contents you got from the grocery store", that doesn't count as real food, for nutrients quality nor taste.
Vegetables/fruit take a minute or two to chop and pan-fry / prep as you like.
Protein can be as simple as a poached chicken breast, roasts again just stick them in an oven. Beans in a pressure cooker, that's also pretty automatic too.
Cooking's as time-consuming as you make it.
And then these can be batched-up / prepped as a morning chore; I find it takes less time than cleaning the house. I don't batch as I like the break in the day of another activity. It's less time than a commute.
YouTube is packed full of easy, tasty recipes if looking for somewhere to start.
I've been using the newbie friendly NYT no knead bread[1] for years, and it's that easy. The only gotcha is that you have to prepare it the night before, but that isn't really a big deal in practice. Bread is surprisingly difficult to ruin, and fresh daily bread has been a huge boon for me in these new WFH times.
I highly recommend it.
[1] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread
Shred lettuce, slice avocado and serve with some chunky bread rolls. Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, 1 bowl and a plate.
Cook for 3 minutes and you have a delicious noodle soup. Add chicken or protein for extra fun.
Hoping I can expense the tp at least.
Unblock yourself maybe? Pitch to your management that your productivity is bad and get them to either: a) let you bring hardware home, or b) expense your monitors for WFH.
So sorry about the dishes, but perhaps your dish washing efficiency will improve? If it's directly impactful to your productivity now for a single individual's daily calories it suggests you've got a lot to learn here! Perhaps a G2G course once normal business returns?
In terms of the monitor I can't help you, my most productive years were on an 11" MacBook air with a single tmux session. A 13" laptop sounds heavy.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google)
Is google not giving its employees monitors during this time? I find that surprising but also you could just go to Best Buy.
It's funnier because this is the NYC office and no one drives, so he was probably lugging it all the way through the subway system.
How is this even an argument??
Incidentally I do already have a monitor at home, that costs more than $500. And I'm not using it for WFH, because I find my 15" work laptop sufficient.
(b) If you're really unable or unwilling to cook or do the dishes, food delivery services are still running and the restaurants they deliver from will be happy to have your order. Order hot food and re-heat it on arrival if you're worried about getting infected from your food. Or maybe look at once of the box-meal delivery services, you still need to cook, but most of the prep work is done.
(c) buy a cheap monitor for now and sell or donate it after you go back to work. You can get a refurb 22" monitor for $50 or so which must be better than a 13" laptop display.
More like $30 for a coffee machine and $250 for a dishwasher. Then $150+ each for external monitors.
Maybe this is what you wete refering to, but I could only find Bill Gates guessing grocery item prices:
It just depends on if you want nice stuff or really basic stuff. The nice stuff costs a lot more than the prices you quoted, just like a nice midrange car like a Camry costs a lot more than a basic, bottom-of-the-line car (Yaris?).
Considering the audience of this site, I would assume most here would buy higher-end stuff, and not the cheapest things available.
It's kinda like my fancy tea infuser cup: I have a nice glass mug with a laser-cut stainless-steel infuser for loose tea. It was $30 at a fancy store (could probably get it cheaper on Amazon), but it's a one-time purchase. With high-end loose tea, it makes great tea, but the problem is cleaning: cleaning out the infuser (by hand) is a lot more work than just dumping a tea bag in the trash and putting a regular mug in the dishwasher. But the results certainly are a lot better than a $0.20 tea bag.
To highlight the absurdity of this estimate: $2000 USD should be enough to pay for an entire work-from-home setup with a high quality office chair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a whiteboard in addition to what I have mentioned above (assuming that work provides your computer).
Although it’s not 4K, given the fact that it ships with a color calibration report I think calling it “some gaming monitor” is a bit silly.
As someone who’s a bit of a picture quality fanatic (I preferred color accurate panel displays “before it was cool”, my television is a 4K HDR10 OLED, etc.) I think it’s quite ridiculous that you’d classify your suggestions as anything other than luxuriously decadent for most programming work.
Edited to remove a claim that I haven't seen 4k monitors, since I just realized the big displays we can get must be 4k. We can only have one of those though and they're not as fancy as you're claiming.
You could also make or buy cold brew coffee (Amazon Fresh delivers large Chameleon cold brew containers to many areas). It stays fresh pretty long if you keep it refrigerated.
Is this a joke??? Just buy a coffee machine like a normal person.
You just have to move to one of their delivery areas, such as Christiansburg, Virginia.
But, yes, if you're looking purely for the caffeine and nothing else, a cheap coffee machine is the way to go.
However, you can’t deny the benefits of going remote if the above is a wash depending on the company.
It's a different thing when you go into it with the attitude that 1) it is permanent 2) you're expected to be productive as any other full time employee on normal days, onsite or not 3) you'll be fired if you goof off too much.
First, the company has always been extremely supportive. Many employees have been working from home exclusively for years and nearly all of us WFH from time to time at least. The processes and expectations are well established. Engineers have always been supplied with a laptop in addition to their workstation, so WFH has always been immediately possible for everyone. You get your pick of hardware, but all the systems and services and processes have been optimized to make it reasonable (not just possible) to get serious engineering work done with nothing but a Chromebook. I've seen many programmers working _at the office_ from a Chromebook because they liked the interface. But for most of us... it's not optimal.
Corp work has to be done on Corp-owned hardware. This is enforced by technical controls that can't readily be circumvented, so even if you have a great computer at home, you'll be working from your laptop. Many of us at the kitchen table. Unless, of course, you've gotten a corp-issued rig in your house... which can't have happened in the past couple of months because the computer hardware supply chain in China has been shut down for a long time. Think you'll just go buy a nice monitor from Best Buy and dock it with your laptop? You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
At a team level, it's been a mess. Productivity is definitely not up. We still get a lot of stuff done and we haven't adjusted any of our forecasts, but coordination has become a whole lot harder. Sure the company has been generally ready for this for a long time, but as individuals we were a bit blind-sided by the suddenness of it. Oh, and the local school district has gone "remote-learning" as well for this month (think WFH, but for 9-year-olds), so local parents are doubling as home-school proctors. It's not a distraction-free environment.
Thing is, we wouldn't have offices if it we didn't work more efficiently there. It's not like working from home is something foreign to us; like I said, we all do it as often as we like. Each of us maybe a couple of days a month, as circumstances require. But sending everyone home at the same time, that hasn't been the utopia it might seem to the casual onlooker.
You have a great computer at home, but it has no monitor and you use it from the kitchen table? I have a "decent" computer at home, and I plug my work laptop into the monitor when I work from home.
You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
You'd think that living and working in the Seattle area that you'd have heard of a little online retailer based in Seattle called Amazon. They can deliver a name-brand 27" 1920x1080 monitor to you tomorrow for less than $150. Want a nice 32 inch wide screen 3840x2160 like you ahve at work? That's closer to $350 but you can still have it tomorrow. I see lots of monitors in stock there (as well as on Newegg and bhphotovideo, my other go-to online merchants).
If I didn't already have a good monitor at home and desk to put it on, I'd just buy a cheap $99 27" monitor and set it up on the kitchen table during the day, then if I no longer needed it after the office re-opened, I'd donate it somewhere.
At my company, WFH hasn't been an issue so far -- we have multiple offices and everyone was already used to using Slack and video conference meetings. To be honest, it's even easier to hold a meeting now since no one needs to find a conference room (they are always in short supply). But everyone uses a laptop as their primary computer, if they need something more powerful, they use a cloud VM.
Frankly, its a little bizarre that you have non-laptop company issued hardware for doing work. No company I've ever worked at, from small tech startups to large, non-tech Fortune 500 companies in industries not known for being cutting edge, would have these issues. But every company I've worked at issued everyone uses laptops, utilized team software (Slack/Teams), and had options for either using ssh into on more powerful onsite servers or cloud computing, for the instances where it is required.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Every-Engineer-in-my-team-at-...
I cope with loneliness by throwing parties inviting people I don't know but am somehow connected with, either via language studies, art clubs, hobbies etc. I partied with billionaires, professors from Princeton etc. that way.
I've visited Google offices occasionally on weekends, and they're ghost towns.
It might be that a lot of disagreement about the viability of WFH is simply due to people having different types of work in mind.
IMO, it’s a real estate thing more than a productivity thing.
If we’re talking about weeks-months of WFH, then going from Office->WFH->Office seems like the more likely plan. Like how experiencing a blizzard may mean not going to the office for 1-2 weeks, but at some point a return will happen.
Companies that own/rent nice, expensive buildings to contain hundreds/thousands of employees are not going to write it off and stop using them for full-remote all of a sudden. The physiological value of WFH is not as quantifiable to bean count as property asset value.
I've worked in an office for years, and then transitioned to working from home for years. The initial transition was rough: snacking, lack of motivation, lack of structure.
But it only took about a month to get past that. You start building your own routine and structure, optimized to your life, not a mandated 9-5. Not only am I more efficient and less stressed at home, I'm pretty certain I actually "work" more hours than sitting at an office.
And I'm a pretty extroverted person, that thrives with other human contact. When working from home, I get to choose when to socialize/collaborate, it isn't hoisted on me.
I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Or were you saying that as "they will now learn about the advantages after this experiment"?
I also don't think it's a clean experiment as many other factors are impacting people's productivity anyways, but the results will definitely be interesting to look at.
If 'remote work' were some really expensive investment, then we could see that it would take some to make it's way into big corps.
But it's relatively easy, and trivial to experiment with, and most companies don't do it in most cases.
All of MAGA have though- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540831