Please also keep in mind that we didn't just shift from in-person to remote work. Among other things, many parents completely lost child care in March 2020. It was slow to return. Where I live, it wasn't until August 2021 that the public schools were back to (almost) normal from a child care perspective: students there for the full school day every day, and at-school after care programs available. Speaking from personal experience, 2020 was horrible for my productivity, and I noped out of the workforce in early 2021 and am finally looking for a job now. I don't feel it was due to the shift to remote work.

I think it's true that some people will "try to get away with absolutely everything they can", but I'm not sure about "an awful lot of people". There are other reasons that productivity and availability tanked.

edit: and let's imagine that I didn't have the finances to quit despite other demands preventing me from putting in a full workday (and me not feeling up to one anyway). I probably would have kept plugging along, sort of working, as best as I could. We could debate the morality of that, and maybe remote work makes it more possible to get away with that, but I wouldn't say remote work is the underlying reason people aren't putting in a full day's work. Maybe for many, "get away absolutely everything they can" should read "get away with absolutely everything they have to" or "do only what they can".

Agreed.

> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.

Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.

Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.

btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)

> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)

Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.

I don't know what to make of the teachers' unions. My personal experience with individual teachers is that they work plenty, and what I saw during remote school was no exception. (Being a kindergarten teacher over Zoom is hard!) And I never heard a particular teacher in my area advocate for closed or remote schools.

But school administrators blamed the teachers' unions a fair bit for being slow to reopen. In general I suspect school administrators were looking to blame someone else for their own leadership failings, but there still might be some truth in it. I could see how the unions might have adopted the position of the most risk-adverse (and/or laziest) of the teachers.

Yes, there are definitely some individual teachers who care about student learning and work hard to go back to in-person.

Unfortunately, the unions adopt the most risk-averse/lazy possible regarding remote learning. Even in 2022 there are unions pushing hard for effectively indefinite remote learning.[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/us/teachers-unions-covid-...

There is nothing about teachers unions priorities that align in anyway with students & parents priorities.

Schools owe students an education. As you can see from this thread, it's controversial whether adults in tech can work productively remotely. Elementary school kids by and large don't learn well remotely. Unless that changes, it's a moot point whether childcare is just a bonus or something that is owed.

As for the "pandemic" part: I agreed with the closures of schools, preschools, and day cares at the very beginning of the pandemic. It seemed reasonable at first to believe kids spread COVID-19 as much as they seem to spread colds and flus. But it was't long before there was evidence that spread through schools is modest [1], especially with reasonable precautions (e.g. masks). And it was painfully obvious education was suffering. Schools should have reopened a full year sooner than they actually did in my area (and many other areas are worse). Society has a risk budget, and this should have been the priority for spending it, not bars or travel or indulging mask/vaccine denial.

[1] I remember a fair bit of this in the news; a quick search found https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618 from June 2020. I believe it's been consistent since, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103420118 from October 2021.

We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.

Citation needed. There's a ton of evidence that learning has dropped dramatically with remote school. Especially for elementary students, I suspect it is near-zero.

> We should keep in mind that teachers are NOT babysitters. They are educators first, moral compasses second, and a distant 10th a pseudo-guardian. if the complaints here are on the latter, that's not what they are paid for.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Whether teachers like it or not, a significant part of their job is childcare. Society would not fund schools at anywhere near their current rate if they didn't also provide childcare.

Almost every societal group suffered in one way or another, from school kids, single adults, the elder, small business owners and the list goes on.

There wasn't anything specifically targeted at young families. These last years sucked hard for a lot of people.

There's a reason it's protected. You can't just expect business as usual when the entire support chain of society falls over. Everyone and everything has to adapt - people, businesses, etc.

Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.

The bigger point being that childcare expectations were thoroughly disrupted and folk were thrust into it, rather than planning. Coupled with the "will they won't they" come back to work dates, it's made it not super incentivizing for those of us who could afford to figure out better long term options chose not to. Ex. If you knew it was going to be two years before you were expected back in office, moving closer to family might have made sense. Or setting up a home office. Or any number of things to better our home productivity.

My suspicion is those people probably don't do anything while at the office either but they are good at making themselves very visible and appearing to be productive when in an office situation.

Often they'll just shunt them into low prestige tasks, and hope they'll get the hint and leave on their own.

How is this not an immediately fireable offense? At least at the point of reestablishing contact where a doctor’s note or equivalent excuse can’t be furnished…

Doesn't sound like the kind of person you should put all that much effort in for.

If you build an org like this, the inevitable outcome is all the top performers leave (as they're tired of covering for low performers) and eventually nothing gets done at all.

Here's an example from my life:

I'm having a terrible time getting myself to the gym. Two options come to mind to fix this:

1) Use discipline (very hard) and shift my mindset so that going to the gym is not optional (also hard).

2) Apply a structure to my day to where I leave the house by default (not that hard) and have to go to the gym before going home (not nearly as hard as going out of my house specifically to work out).

Otherwise a majority of people wouldn't become obese in developed countries, many people wouldn't be single, etc.

A lot of remote work people are very preachy. It's not helping your cause. You're dealing with imperfect people, that's just fact. Adapt to that.

+1 to the preachiness. You have done zero to help me or anyone else with your comment, GP. But it probably made you feel good to sneer at me.

I hope you get to work 100% remote for the rest of your career though.

edit: for those interested in the empirical science available around discipline, willpower, executive function, I point you to Dr. Huberman who has an INCREDIBLE podcast about these subjects: https://youtu.be/vA50EK70whE

We have, a limited amount, of executive function capacity.

People who are "disciplined" actually don't have any more.

They have good personal habits which automates all the executive function stuff.

Some people just have personalities better suited to this or had a more structured upbringing.

It's one of the hardest problems in a person's life, sustaining good habits over very long periods of time.

It goes above normalcy, it's extraordinary, proven by the fact that most people can't do it.

It goes above normalcy, it's extraordinary, proven by the fact that most people can't do it. - You have to live through each and every second of your life, if you don't set yourself up for success, you'll only have a harder time developing good habits. Life is 100% about developing coping mechanisms. I walk on a treadmill for daily standup, I'm out the office/desk at 4pm and spend time with family/the dog/ a good book. The book thing is key because I've found it levels out my mental state and makes it less erratic.

> which is why you try to tackle the problem every day

Yes, every day I tackle some of my problems. Many days the effort I spend on a problem is to think about how I can develop habits using less executive function.

Today I plan to check out the gym around the corner, because it's closer than the one I've been going to downtown. So close that I could walk there in <5 minutes. This will be easier than any of a 25 minute walk, a 10 minute bike ride (on streets that people drive recklessly on), or a 5 minute drive (that has a lot of friction, especially parking).

None of these are excuses for not going to the gym, but rather than forcing myself through a high friction process, I'm spending those "discipline points" creatively acting to reduce the friction (while managing the rest of my life).

I'll just add one more anecdote to this. I'm also far less healthy during forced-remote COVID time. Try as I might, I just can't get myself to be active and eat healthier.

In the office, I biked to and from work which started me off well, and the structure of the day kept me more on top of everything too. During WFH, I don't exercise - I should, but I just can't make the habit stick. I sleep in cause it's easy - I shouldn't, but I can't seem to stop myself. Making and keeping friendships is harder than it used to be, giving me less reason to go out too. Everything spirals from there. Doing things has become hard.

I've tried habit-forming tricks to try to make it work. I've tried different routines to see if one sticks better than others: different times of the day, different exercises, different types of breaks. I've gone to a psychiatrist and therapist to help improve that "even little things are hard" feeling. I've tried medications like anti-depressants, which I never needed before. Ultimately nothing has worked, and I've spent almost 2 years now at a personal low for mental and physical well-being.

I very much wish I could be like the other people who thrive working remotely. But it's just incompatible with me on a level I can't really explain, and seems silly from the outside. If the tech industry goes full remote, I'll probably consider a career switch, because this isn't sustainable for me. And to be clear, there's only an issue when remote work is involved: I've spent time unintentionally unemployed, and was very happy and healthy. It's really working remotely in particular that does me in. Working in general is hard and stressful, and I need the positives of working in person to counteract that enough that I'm still happy and healthy.

I'm very happy for the people who've found happiness in remote work, and am happy many more people who want it will have that option going forward. But it really isn't for me, as much as I'd like it to be.

I've somewhat recently started socializing with folks outside of work. That's helped as it gets me away from my computer for a while. I can only do a few hours at a time and at most twice a week before I get stressed out, but it's something.

TBH my biggest issue with working in an office was the commute. If I could get to work in a reasonable amount of time (10 minutes, no more) then I would be pretty happy to work in an office again. I'd put up with the interruptions at my desk, kitchen stink, and more interruptions if it meant I could have lunch with my peers and leave my work at work.

Unfortunately, a reasonable commute isn't in the cards for me. I could get there if I switched careers, which I might do when I retire from this one.

Maybe it was general mental health, partly. I live alone, so getting out of the house daily and seeing other people is good for me. I had office friends who it’s hard to keep in touch with.

Structure was another part. I had to get dressed and leave the house at a certain hour, then I had to get my stuff done by 5, when I came back home.

And general peer pressure. I had an open office desk, and I hated that, but in hindsight, it did help me stay on task. Which is kind of hilarious, because the open office floor plan was so distracting that I was terribly inefficient at my desk, so I hid away in corners most of the time to get real work done.

There were tons of negatives to being in the office (god I hate the open office floor plans), but for whatever reasons, I was more productive before the pandemic than I have been during.

Not that I did that.

I think peer pressure, visibility, and lack of non-work distractions are probably the bigger thing, though. Not just in terms of playing video games instead of working but you don't have the option to get up and do the dishes, or take breaks as frequently to read, or any number of other things that are less "slacker" and more "ADD brain".

"Being managed" could also be called "outsourcing executive function"--make your manager think about what you're supposed to be doing.

Reserve that executive function for what you love, your escape plan, or whatever.

I dunno. On some grander level, I know companies mostly just see us as numbers, but (and perhaps I've been lucky) most of the managers I've had have been basically nice folks, some have even given good career development device (some of which seemed much more beneficial to me than the company).

And I bet those nice folks did a good job of taking executive function burden off your back :-)

Just do a decent job while preserving as much of your mental energy as you can for your family and your actual life

I might have misread your emphasis on being managed by others, but it’s not what I meant.

I had people that were rockstars in the office that just didnt do work at home.

Maybe its the removal of distractions (no TV, I may walk by, etc). But even for things that were totally fine remote (ie: Ticket Queues) i noticed very quickly if my status showed "in" they were on it. If my status for any reason showed away, tickets would straight up get ignored. Mentioning this would enact change for a day or two, but ultimately it would return back to status quo. What did happen is that those that were self motivated were quicker/starting to burn out. I had to get with them and intervene and encourage them to take time off, encourage them to let the queue go for their teammates to pick it up etc.

I had other colleagues asking my ops teams to check in on their direct reports and I often had to have meetings telling them thats not a IT/Tech issue and they need to deal with it, just like I am having to..

Frankly i had a mouse shaker on a side box not for MY Managers, but for my direct reports...

As we transitioned back to the office a lot of these issues mostly disappeared. EXCEPT for those with weak/timid managers. A lot of those guys are still slacking, but they were slacking before and the manager just didnt want to handle it.

But my teams....most of them are mostly back to normal. We all have burnout to deal with, myself included and I have had to manage to balance pushing them and encouraging them to do things that dont cause burnout, front structuring your workday, to taking mental health days etc. But ultimately the return to the office was a relief for me, and a lot of that just went away.

I personally think its the removal of distractions coupled with the "threat" of someone walking up that doesnt exist at home. And its worth saying, I'm not one of those old school butts in chairs kinda guy. In fact im pretty laid back, and have been told so by peers and reports alike, and in many cases I have been asked how I am able to be so laid back and still have productivity like I do, but covid made it harder.

And thats beyond the fact that I have colleagues in other divisions that i KNOW are using their WFH days to be out fishing, playing golf, hiking whatever. Personally for me thats an ethics issue, i take days off for that. But I work in a small sector, im not going to tattle tail on someone i may cross paths with down the line, karma will catch them anyhow.

If you look at OSS maintainers, a lot of times their written communication is excellent, and they obviously manage their time really well. These are people who by the very nature of what they maintain are distributed.

A lot of OSS software is also of excellent quality, because they don't have the luxury of being able to be in an offer, fire people, etc...

I would argue to the people who complain about not getting stuff done or that they need structure... don't take those feelings as a sign that you need to automatically return to what you know. You can also take it as a sign that you have an opportunity to grow, but it's just hard... which is totally ok and normal. If you can overcome this, you will become an excellent engineer as a result.

In my experience, a majority of the workforce requires some degree of regular supervision or things will go off the rails quickly. Hell, I am full-time remote (pre-covid) and I don't think I should be left alone on something for more than 2 weeks.

Same, I've been remote for 10 years with another decade+ on-site prior to that as a SE.

I have no issues with remote work. When I need people I can easily schedule calls, send them an instant message, email them, etc.

Every single thing I do is timestamped and logged in a database somewhere at some point. If anyone wants to know what I was working on at 2:13 in the afternoon they can query for it. Reports can be run on what issues I've resolved, what code I've checked in against them, who I was on a meeting with, when I connected to remote machines, what time I started/ended at, etc. at any given time.

I have not noticed any productivity declines, but have noticed huge QoL improvements.

I applaud all shirkers, they are the winners in your story.

I have feeling that in 5 years companies will mostly revert back to only hiring new employees on site but grandfather in previously remote employees who have proven to be able to handle it. In 10 years, it will be almost entirely back to how it was before the pandemic. Not saying this to be a contrarian, and I think there will always be a place for fully remote teams/companies or exceptions in large companies (just as there was in the before times). But it’s really hard to see someone be unproductive or not work much and not attribute that to them being remote - and being remote will be even more likely to be blamed when a large portion of employees aren’t remote already.

As much as life is cyclic, in 10yrs time we AR/VR will be worked out and there will be even less reason to be in a physical space with someone.

Same experience here.

Of course, management shares some of the blame. People will push the boundaries of remote and flex time until someone tells them they’ve gone too far. If nobody in management is doing anything about the abuse, or if someone is openly breaking the rules without any consequences, the bad behavior will only get worse.

As a manager why cant you call out this behaviour when you see people slacking off?

I don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be at your desk to get work done, and I do my own best work usually hiding away somewhere quiet. However, with the middle- to low-performers, I admit it's disquieting to suspect that some people are working only an hour a day, but I have no way to confirm.

But regardless, I disagree with your premise. Software engineering, as a profession, is based largely on trust. This isn't a factory where you have to solder a set number of devices to meet your target numbers. This isn't an animation studio where you have to animate a certain number of director-approved frames ("footage") a week in order to meet your performance expectations.

In our field, the engineer largely decides on their own how much time a task should take, and the manager hopefully trusts their estimate. The *assumption* (and it's not spelled out in your employment contract because we're supposed to be professionals) is that a day of effort means a "full day" of 7-9 hours (or whatever, the precise number isn't the point).

So if I, as a manager, ask you, the developer, how long this feature will take to build out, and you tell me "5 days", well I think it's fair for me to expect you meant 5 "full" days. And because I trust you, I'm not going to look over your shoulder or try to pre-solve the problem you're working on -- I will ideally just trust that it takes you 5 days. And because I think highly of you, I will trust that the work takes a dedicated and fast-working developer 5 days to finish, and that's that.

If I find out that all along, you really were working only an hour a day, then I think it's fair for me to say: "What the actual fuck, you tell me these tasks require a week of effort but they really could have been done in one day, and the project could have been moving 5x faster than it has been."

But... the other option, I suppose, is for managers to decide by themselves how long each feature and bugfix should take, and not ask the developers or take their feedback, and then the manager can evaluate the developers' performance based on that. As a manager, I'll look at a task and say "I want this done in 1 day" and when you tell me "That's not possible, it will take at least a week" I'll just say "Too bad -- get to work". We don't want that.... do we?

Wait you don't have KPIs?

A tiny minority might be doing that but I dont think the vast majority work only 1 hour a day.

Are also saying that you can figure out an employee is working only 1 hour a day when you are in the office?

And no, I can't tell if someone is "actually working" just by being in the office. I have no interest in standing behind them at their desk all day.

On the other hand, I had one case where someone on my team had like zero committed code in weeks, and was WFH'ing several days a week (pre-pandemic) as an arrangement he'd made with his previous manager. When we had "the talk" about his low performance, one of the things I asked him was to stop with the WFH except for emergencies. That did, in fact, help keep him more accountable for his time, and being physically present helped him interact with the rest of the team and spend time whiteboarding, etc. And performance overall improved.

Is there a lesson there to generalize? Maybe, not sure. It's all very context- and individual- dependent.

It happens if your company, originally on site, suddenly become remote. Nobody knows how to do remote works.

My manager is one of them. I am slacking because there is literally no tasks (no tasks given from him). Also same when in the office, but he has a habit of initiating small talk and assign / proceed tasks there, which isn't possible in remote world.

Changing at how you work remote is crucial at maintaining productivity.

It's not that they're trying to "get away with absolutely anything". It's that their survival incentive is not to get fired, and they've been operating in that mode for years if not decades. The less you do, the less likely you are to inadvertently piss someone off and lose your job. Overperformers get fired faster than underperformers, who can usually kick around in the system for years.

Take a risk and win, and your boss makes more money. Take a risk and lose, and your income drops by 100%. The incentive structure rewards doing as little as possible, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing, because there are organizational situations in which it's better for people to be underutilized than overtaxed and therefore unpredictable.

Capitalism is an abusive system, but there's no escape because the legal system is on the abuser's side. How do you survive an abuser, if you can't get away? You become meek, reactive, and passive.

Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.

They weren't getting much done in the office, either. In fact, in the office regime, the problem employees were interfering with other people's productivity. In the WFH world, they do less damage.

Maybe they're in a blind spot for you, but I guarantee you they exist, and they're probably the majority.

The environment that you work in has an effect on how well you can do the work.

Why does that matter? We should probably start asking how much does it actually correlate with productivity, before assigning it importance.

I have a hunch that even if there even is such a thing as self-motivation, and even if there is a correlation with production, the effect size is probably not high and is conflated with other factors which explain a much higher proportion of the variability.

An employer which cares about their workers will (a) grant them the freedom to work from home, and (b) provide them with the structure to do so effectively. In the absence of such structure I can see how motivation could replace it and make up the productivity, however that should not be the worker’s responsibility. The loss in productivity is 100% on management for failing to provide to structure to keep the workers productivity while remote.

self motivation seems to me to be a poor excuse to shift the responsibility of management to the worker.

Are you sure they were doing more work while in office?