Do you have data to back your conclusion up?

I am a father of four (though they're here less now that they're leaving the nest), happily married, active in a committed church community and love outdoor things like water skiing, flying planes, snow skiing, biking, etc. I build things like legos, stand up paddle boards, Ford ranger engines, and the 1000 ft addition we added to our home. I enjoy my work--sometimes I love it even, and other days I'm ready to rage quit, because I'm one of those difficult to manage dramatic people--it is hardly my whole life though.

I have spent nearly 10 years (2 different gigs) of my 30 working years working from a home office. In both instances, it was awesome at first, and then I came to hate it. I totally concur with the GP. I'm just not as productive at home. I know that most of us in all 3 teams where we've done some remote work are generally more productive when gathered. No amount of technology solutions has improved that.

My suspicion is that there are other factors at play here. In my case, I've worked in companies where the software development components of the company are relatively small (anywhere from 2 up to at most 18 people). My commutes have all been (relatively) short (15 minutes or less). I've always had flexible schedule available to me--come go when you need, get the work done. And at times, I do actually choose to sequester myself at home to write a mountain of code that just needs a mountain of direct writing.

I'm curious if perhaps it's not so much work at home, as it is some degree of autonomy that needs to be given to people to manage their own work load. That kind of autonomy tends to go down as company size goes up. If corporate overhead burns up a lot of ones time, then it may indeed be that people feel they are getting more creative work down at home.

What I'd like to see is more flexibility, less middle management (because I think this is the real source of most of these issues) and more of the "teach the employees correct principles and allow them to govern themselves" gestalt.

If I could go back to a campus where I had an office and we sat around watching the coordinated people do bean bag tricks and talking about whether we needed a formal state machine for something or just a few flags and also did you see the cool library X did for something, sure, I'd go there. But to go to a crowded place where people take stand up meetings seriously and there's so much noise and I'm cold all day and the coffee sucks, eh, not so compelling. I went into the office park with offices even when my creeping environmentalism had be taking 90 minutes of subways and a bus (tho not 5 days a week). My take is always if you have a lot of work to, it's better to do it from home. If you need more work, go into the office and find it.

This is how I see it as well. If I had a private office in Bell Labs with plenty of co-working space I would prefer to go into the office to WFH. The reality is that the majority of office environments are loud, cramped, stressful, distracting sweat shops. If I had to choose between that and WFH I will choose WFH every time. If my work provided me with a nice private office with plenty of coworking space I would probably prefer the office to WFH.

>My suspicion is that there are other factors at play here.

Do you have data to back up your suspicion?

weak

> This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives.

Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.

> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).

You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".

So you're choosing work productivity/efficiency over hobbies, family and friends and feel work isn't the primary focus in your life?

I've found that too, I'm more efficient working in an office, but you know what, I don't care as much anymore. Being at home, in my community, with my family more often and for longer time throughout the day, taking breaks to do whatever around the house of go for a walk. That's what matters now. If I'm less productive, I think that's fine because my overall happiness increases. Companies should just factor that in from now on and many do.