But also, keep in mind that while this sample is far from perfect, it’s many times better than people posting on lemmy claiming that they work better from home.
No, it’s literally just as biased, but in the other direction.
You’re missing my point. I get that it’s better for the individual to be full WFH. I don’t deny this. But we’re talking about productivity here in the office.
But here’s the thing, it’s not more productive to go to the office.
Have you read the actual “studies” being cited in that Forbes article?
In the first, they randomly assign employees to work from home scenarios, meaning that random employees here and there are working remotely while everyone else is in office. This is not a study of whether a company can work effectively remotely it’s a study of what happens when you take an in-office company and tell someone to work at home at random once in a while.
In the second working paper from Stanford, if you actually dig into how they’re measuring productivity, every single study they bring up is one that measures the effects when a fully in-office company, like an Indian call-center, suddenly shift to remote work because of a global pandemic, not one studying how fully remote companies or teams compare to their in office or hybrid counterparts.
Can you point me to some study that confirms that this would replace it?
No, but I can point you to many high functioning fully remote teams and companies… As mentioned above there’s not a lot of actual good research on this.
But I think most people work kind of asynchronously, and this is forcing them to sync these moments (when, IME, they happen kind of spontaneously, and I don’t see how it would replace the times when I’m talking to one person, a third overhears it and says “I have something useful to add.”), which isn’t natural.
Regular rituals like stand-ups, retros, demos etc give people some opportunities to ask questions like this, and like I mentioned, pair programming gives constant opportunity for this. When I was at a MAANG company our team also had “in-office zoom hours” where we’d all get on a zoom call for 2 hours, 3 times a week, and it was an opportunity for people to openly discuss things and ask questions as if we were all sitting at desks in the office. One team I was on used gather.town to replicate an office experience for this.
Remote work doesn’t just magically happen, you do need some culture and rituals and effort, and companies that aren’t setup for that aren’t going to thrive like that, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
In the past year I spent half my time with a team that was entirely in-office with just us contractors being remote, and it was awful. Documentation was terrible, they constantly did conference room zoom meetings where you couldn’t tell who was talking, and critical information was communicated by tapping people on the shoulder. Did it work for them? Sure. But it was a nightmare to try and take their system and suddenly do it remote.
I then spent the second half of the year with a completely remote team, and it was amazing. Even for those of us coming in as relatively green backend devs, we excelled. We were talking with the team on slack and zoom constantly, and pair programming with multiple people on a daily basis and we learned a ton and got a ton done.
High functioning teams get stuff done, if you can put together a high functioning team just using the people who happen to live within biking distance of your office that’s great, but in the long run I have no doubt that company’s that can accept talent from anywhere will come out ahead.
No, it’s literally just as biased, but in the other direction.
But here’s the thing, it’s not more productive to go to the office.
Have you read the actual “studies” being cited in that Forbes article?
In the first, they randomly assign employees to work from home scenarios, meaning that random employees here and there are working remotely while everyone else is in office. This is not a study of whether a company can work effectively remotely it’s a study of what happens when you take an in-office company and tell someone to work at home at random once in a while.
In the second working paper from Stanford, if you actually dig into how they’re measuring productivity, every single study they bring up is one that measures the effects when a fully in-office company, like an Indian call-center, suddenly shift to remote work because of a global pandemic, not one studying how fully remote companies or teams compare to their in office or hybrid counterparts.
No, but I can point you to many high functioning fully remote teams and companies… As mentioned above there’s not a lot of actual good research on this.
Regular rituals like stand-ups, retros, demos etc give people some opportunities to ask questions like this, and like I mentioned, pair programming gives constant opportunity for this. When I was at a MAANG company our team also had “in-office zoom hours” where we’d all get on a zoom call for 2 hours, 3 times a week, and it was an opportunity for people to openly discuss things and ask questions as if we were all sitting at desks in the office. One team I was on used gather.town to replicate an office experience for this.
Remote work doesn’t just magically happen, you do need some culture and rituals and effort, and companies that aren’t setup for that aren’t going to thrive like that, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
In the past year I spent half my time with a team that was entirely in-office with just us contractors being remote, and it was awful. Documentation was terrible, they constantly did conference room zoom meetings where you couldn’t tell who was talking, and critical information was communicated by tapping people on the shoulder. Did it work for them? Sure. But it was a nightmare to try and take their system and suddenly do it remote.
I then spent the second half of the year with a completely remote team, and it was amazing. Even for those of us coming in as relatively green backend devs, we excelled. We were talking with the team on slack and zoom constantly, and pair programming with multiple people on a daily basis and we learned a ton and got a ton done.
High functioning teams get stuff done, if you can put together a high functioning team just using the people who happen to live within biking distance of your office that’s great, but in the long run I have no doubt that company’s that can accept talent from anywhere will come out ahead.