I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out to prevent eye, neck and wrist strain, or to blow off frustration with a difficult issue. That isn't abusing WFH, it's using time wisely. I can't speak for the people ghosting, but doing chores is not abusing WFH.

>That isn't abusing WFH

Did anyone say it was?

Your words.

> I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement...

What does "it" refer to in that sentence, if not the immediately preceding "abusing WFH?"

Which of the things you mentioned are equivalent to doing a distracting task during a meeting you're supposed to be paying attention to?

You may be surprised to know that one can do meal prep and pay attention to sprint refinement at the same time. For me, having something to do with my hands while talking helps to keep me focused.

You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature. You can't do that with raw chicken on your hands or while walking to the fridge to get veggies.

The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.

> You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature.

That's a load of context that wasn't clear from your original comment. The jargon "refinement" is not used where I work.

> The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.

That you then need to backfill assumed context is not going to be solved by returning to office. That it's now been clarified in text, in a work situation, could be turned into a resource to be referenced in a future conversation. In the office, the explanation would be ephemeral, and may need frequent repetition until somebody overcomes the hurdle of committing it to text.

I'm not sure how this context is relevant. The point is that you're supposed to be paying attention and I've not yet met a human that can pay attention to two things at once as well as they can to one. I've met a lot that think they can but not any that actually could.

This is why return to office is an attractive option. People are definitely not bringing veggies to chop or laundry to fold to a conference room. And most of them are going to pay attention to a person in their presence talking to them because of basic social niceties. It solves the problem with much less hassle than actually having to identify and cull people who can't handle WFH.

“The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.”

Here we have your reason for wanting people in the office - you’re an irrational micromanaging bully who’s inflated ego make you think you’re somehow above strangers and are entitled to lecture them about how they are supposed to work

You make evaluations of people without knowing their story. You make assumptions and feel valid in rushing into those assumptions to put someone beneath you

I’m glad people like you are being phased out of many industries now that WFH is here to stay

> irrational micromanaging bully

The fact that having a standard of "pay attention in meetings & don't be a ghost" gets you labelled an "irrational micromanaging bully" is exactly why management pushes for a return to office. It's just way less of a hassle for them than having these sorts of battles.

> evaluations of people without knowing their story.

Pot meet kettle

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Maybe put your condescension away for a second and try to understand a different perspective.

Your refinements work a little different than mine. In mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often the same person) reads the story, gives any extra context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it doesn't always have to be a research session.

Is that… something that ever happens in a meeting in person?

> Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation

That seems odd to me. I can give my full attention to something I am reading, or to listening to what a person is saying in the meeting, but not both at the same time. If I start looking up documentation, I'm going to miss what is being said.

Can... can most people split their attention this way? Am I weird?

I can do a completely mindless manual task while listening to someone speaking (though I struggle to do something manual while reading) - but this doesn't seem to be what is expected here.

I can talk and listen while chopping veg, but okay

"A lot of people are abusing WFH" doesn't mean "all" so ask yourself why you are assuming this internet stranger has unfairly lumped you, personally and specifically, into the "abusing" group and taking offense?

Thanks, this made me laugh out loud. Of course I feel guilty every time I step away from work. That doesn't make that reflex healthy or sustainable.

Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR.

If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.

Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately just took longer than expected.

And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.

Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.

When people were in the office, were you able to tell the difference between someone staring blankly at a screen vs actually doing work for six hours?

I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A much smaller temptation than all the entertainment options in your house and abound.

I think for most people, procrastination isn't actually about doing the more fun option.

To me this reads as wanting to crunch developers out of more value than one is paying them.

Expecting people to pay attention during meetings and not be a ghost during a day is crunching developers? Give me a break. We're all highly paid professionals. It's not unreasonable to be expected to act like it.

I swear the entitlement in this industry is off charts.

Yeah I really doubt many people here would be happy about being grilled constantly about their output. I'd rather work in a high trust environment, but this requires actually having trust which is pretty hard remote.

Our solution here to quickly manage out the folks who don’t build trust. Using a simple “yes/maybe/no” framework and have maybe converge with no in a month, you quickly get to a team with high trust.

This is an interesting problem. The counter problem is how do we avoid companies making too much profit? Because that is free money the company got lazily without the shareholders working extra hours.

Contractors get to set their hours. Employees are expected to be performing services for their employers for a minimum of 30 hours per week: https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin....

If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.

Ever read "Thinking fast and slow"? You can more effectively problem-solve when not actively trying to solve them, so it seems completely reasonable to me to distract your conscious mind while pondering a problem.

I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day. The rest of the time they do other personal things but are still available online. They get told they're doing a great job and hit all the important targets.

This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores, etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit, because life's too short).

Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based on deliverables.

>I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a day.

I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work more like 3-4 hours a week.

They are. My former employer briefly had WFH due to COVID. It ended with a small number of people getting fired and the rest coming back 5 days a week. People just weren’t working, and they had some astonishing IT stats that hinted at how bad it was.

Over at Google, there’s an internal study that shows raw code checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I’m pretty sure Sundar’s 20% more productivity comment came directly from the numbers in those slides.

It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone the length of calling out their employees’ productivity directly. I’m really surprised this comment is this far down, when it’s been painfully obvious at the couple companies I’ve worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all complaining of worker productivity, I think that’s the true reason. I think we’re too afraid to take an honest look at how productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH we want to defend so badly.

> it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working

In a rare occasion I get a desk anywhere near a coworker when we are in the office, I also find it hard to know how much they are working.

The physical presence in the same city, building, or even sat right next to each other, goes not give me any information.

You shouldn't need to measure your company's productivity in output based on these things. Are people getting the necessary work done? Your measures are wrong if you feel worried about not being able to tell if people are "actually working". It should be painfully obvious if the necessary work isn't getting done.