This past year wasn't WFH. This was WFH during a pandemic. Thinking they are the same is a mistake.

Exactly. People with school-aged kids had to deal with them being home - and then many kids were doing distance learning and one or more parents had to become teaching-assistants - or at the very least, "tech support" for the myriad of cobbled-together distance learning solutions/issues/gear (many kids may have even had to share limited computer resources/bandwidth).

Their spouses who may have worked outside the home, were home.

If they had not worked from home previously, chances are - they didn't have a dedicated office space - or even equipment.

Add to that the constant low-level stress of being in a pandemic with constant media impressions, massive social change events/activities (at least for those in North America with BLM and the moronic exit of the Orange-moron), and it isn't a stretch to think that productivity has been down somewhat.

Curious what you think the main differences are.

Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.

Many people don't actually have a setup optimized for working at home, or at least didn't for much of the pandemic. Seemed like half of my team had to buy a desk because they didn't have one before the pandemic started. People are working at their kitchen table on a hard chair with their 3 roommates or family members milling about. And a lot of the country has had schools closed or remote for much of the last year, meaning parents are trying to work while trying to watch their kids and make sure they are getting into the right Zoom meetings, doing their schoolwork, etc. No wonder some people are desperate to get back into the office.

But a true work from home setup likely involves having a dedicated home office space, with the right setup. Even now, a lot of people don't have that.

Good points all around. Thanks!

> Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.

I would assume for people with children being able to offload them to public education institutions during work hours will be significant difference.

> Curious what you think the main differences are.

From my experience (2 days/week WFH before pandemic):

1. People with kids have to babysit (I do not have children, but people who have are noticeably impacted by this)

2. Everything is closed, so casual outing to coffee shop or just grabbing a lunch with colleagues not possible. Some goes for just going to gym for a bit.

3. Before the pandemic, sometimes we did morning in the office filled with debate/design work, then lunch and then go home to bunker down and code. Again, not possible now.

4. Two adults in one room makes meetings annoying (well, basically openspace but without the free food).

5. Team beer is remote now, which I mean, kinda works. I get drunk anyway. But still, suck a bit.

What is the measure of productivity? Lines of codes added/removed? Functions written? Jira tickets etc? How do we exactly know that if they are tickets, they are exactly the same size before and after the pandemic?

And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?

You can look at the distributions of ticket sizes and make sure they are roughly the same as before. With enough data it is pretty easy to observe a change in productivity even if you are using measures that aren’t good absolute measures of productivity.

Would be curious to hear what KPIs you're measuring that so consistently show a 66% drop across the board. Pretty impressive measurement...

same for my clients. the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go.

and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so.

i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...

Then address the issue instead of saying "ah this sucks"

Is it their work conditions? IT limitations? Family? Just the fact that everything sucks?

you have to put yourself in the manager’s shoes. before WFH x features deployed, after WFH and covid y features deployed. if y is much smaller than x then it’s clear WFH + pandemic drove this. so no more pandemic and no more WFH should bring back x.

Not sure I believe that, I think it was probably drop in profits because of the pandemic. My team has stayed coherent and 75% of us want to continue working from home because we're doing a bit better than last year and productivity and profits are up. There's nothing really special either about us, just a bunch of hardware and embedded engineers working on medical projects using email, webex and slack.

    the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go.

To drop productivity even more?

Down since WFH? Or down since the pandemic? Both have an impact on mental health and thus productivity metrics, and it’s important to differentiate, because the pandemic won’t be around forever, but it started around the same time as mass WFH.

If that demographics shares the mentality of seeing work as a place to "hang out with friends", it might not be surprising that when control, hierarchical and peer pressure incentives get loose, the same people consider being at home as being on holiday with a few minutes of work from time to time.

It is also likely that we are talking about a young demographics which lacks the maturity needed to work remotely efficiently through self-control (I've been that kind 15 years ago for my first remote experience which was a disaster, but my second remote experience was opposite, extremely positive for myself and my output). I didn't pay attention to it when I started writing, but the fact that you mention "gamedev" is a good hint at this.

Ex-gamedev but I'm still in touch with lots of ex coworkers and friends in the industry and most say the same thing, somewhere between 'low productivity' and 'disaster'. Some of them meet up on their own without management knowledge.

Sales and marketing seem to work as usual though, just from homes. Obviously game sales skyrocketed over past year, so it is hard to reliably grade their performance.

One production team that started transition to remote work before pandemic reported no significant slowdown. They hired bunch of highly skilled multi-disciplinary contractors all over the world and let go most of their regular staff, but it is fairly small team so I don't think this approach can scale.

I listened to a psychology prof., who said "the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait in real life is extremely low, OTOH the probability of encountering a person with anti-social trait on internet is extremely high". Because internet provides a safe way to act toxic without any repercussion in real life.

When I see the OP comment which claims WFH is the only way and any other way to is just "backward thinking" in a very self-aggrandizing manner, I just remind myself that internet is safe haven for the type of people, whom I will rarely meet in real life.

Would that 34% come from fear and stress? People at office feel the pressure more and work above their means and then take holidays when they are completely burned out to recover instead of enjoying it. 66% is probably your real baseline level of productivity and something to learn from. If you are their superior they may not even be your friends, but just pretend they are out of fear of being fired or treated unfavourably.

That's weird. At my company our performance improved with everyone working from home. Some peoples' individual performance deteriorated slightly, but it's made up for by the rest.