My prior bias leans toward thinking WFH is not so bad for productivity, but I think you raise a really important point that I agree with:
Developers tend to focus on individual productivity at the expense of organisational productivity.
The latter is what actually matters, and that could very well necessitate slower individual pace, more checkins with other teams, project leads changing their mind more frequently, and so on.
From my first hand experience this generalization is wrong as it comes down to each individual developer.
We have highly skilled developers using vim and editing code very fast as well as other skilled developers using VS Code of Eclipse as plain text editors. Less skilled developers usually think that text editors like vim improve their quality/speed because the very skilled developers use them whereas they‘re usually lacking knowledge for concepts and the language. This leads to a double slowdown from less skilled developers struggling now with their editor and the work they‘re supposed to do.
It usually comes down to what each individual developer is comfortable with compared to what they think they should be using regardless if text or GUI based.
These are all very contradictory hypotheses from presumed earlier assertions. I strongly suspect we're not analyzing the dynamics and variables at a sufficiently granular level to synthesize any useful hypotheses. I'm trying to reconcile a set of earlier assertions out of global corporate postures from these recent pronouncements that Covid-WFH (as opposed to true-WFH) leads to productivity declines.
If WFH is an intractable hit to productivity due to lack of butts in seats, then what is the salient difference from outsourcing / offshoring? If the productivity loss of the latter is simply more acceptable due to a cost differential, then we have thus established a clearing price for that productivity loss. Or are the positions not sufficiently similar to draw that parallel?
If so much fortuitous collaboration happens when on-prem that it becomes a compelling cited factor to go on-prem, then are we making the parallel assertion all the effort for planning is not capturing even a significant fraction of this fortuitous dynamic, much of our planning is compellingly guided by Organizational Physical Brownian Motion?
I don't have a strong preference either way. Pay me enough, I'll show up and do the work. But I cut my teeth in a consulting / professional services context where the WFH discussion was very different: pay a premium (weekly round-trip flights) to put butts in on-prem seats, or less for WFH-delivered skills.
From well over a hundred client engagements by now, my personal opinion is there is no one-size-fits-all unless leadership explicitly builds the organization for it. There are definitely different workers who thrive under the different models, and those who under-deliver and abuse their working conditions. It's an incredibly tough leadership decision. I think much of that decision hinges upon how well the organization is led and coordinated. I have observed from my set of clients that WFH done well requires disciplined teams who produce more communications artifacts internally and externally with other teams, and this longer-term tends to encourage more organizational flexibility (because the published information decouples from people and disseminates deeper and faster). For various reasons, on-prem tends to lead to an over-reliance upon verbal, tribal communication modalities in most organizations.
The strangest part is that if you asked individual developers, they would insist that WFH made them more productive and increased their efficiency. Yet managers and the data universally agreed that the opposite was true.
There’s something about WFH that puts distance between individuals and the overall big picture reality in a way that makes these overall issues difficult to see from individual perspectives. It also slowed and dampened all of the feedback loops, giving people the wrong impression that they were working on the right thing or producing proper results until much later. We tried compensating with even more manager effort and over-the-top communication repetition to try to keep everyone informed but it didn’t really help.
There were a few exceptions of people who had identical levels of performance during WFH, but they generally achieved it with significantly more work and proactive communication. Those who struggled the most were juniors who felt like they fell through the cracks.
It’s a difficult topic to discuss on HN because few of us like to admit that WFH is, on average, a struggle for companies. No one likes the idea that WFH comes at a cost.