From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_:
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work.
Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app.
Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further.
There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.
@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality.
It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity:
"We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a
Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that
engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’
programming output. "
So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research.
For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.
Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.
At a minimum you'd expect a few more companies, more sources than just code review and code productivity metrics (this alone disqualifies the study because it centers on just one task: software development) etc.
Which seems very consistent with everything I've seen over a fairly long career. I'd add not just co-workers but also other interactions with industry peers.
Where do companies otherwise prioritize long-run development over short-term output? In my experience, generally nowhere. So why would this make managers push RTO more?
Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.
I think this will do exactly nothing for RTO, neither increase nor decrease the push from management.
The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.
Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.
I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.
New to the company. Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your corner of Slack, and pick up more info about how the company works.
> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.
In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.
The “if you trusted them enough to hire them you should trust them with everything unconditionally” meme is popular, but it’s a very weak argument.
Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.
You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.
For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.
With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.
I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.
Building trust is a gradual thing. You give some, you get some, you do that long enough and you will have a lot of trust. You can still lose it all in a heartbeat. But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.
I say that hiring someone is not an absolute vote of confidence in a person. Even if someone is a veteran worker, most companies have a new employee orientation. Having a "probation period" where someone comes into the office to integrate and meet people and work more collaboratively makes sense to me.
Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.
Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.
> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.
The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...
In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.
As for the code review data they analyzed:
"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed-
back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow-
up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase
in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the
online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "
I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.
Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..."
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas.
Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.
Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.
All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office.
Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
This all vibes with what I observed during the pandemic myself, also in a Fortune 500 SV enterprise:
* Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree.
* Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills.
* The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence.
My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.
Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship...
All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?
Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
It's in the study, generally it's sitting close enough to converse
they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
In the current business environment, employees aren't people they're "jobs". As long as they're treated as "jobs" why do you care where they sit as long as "the job" gets done? In fact, you shouldn't care WTF they're doing at all as long as "the job" gets done! Money goes in and work gets done. Simple, right?
Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".
This work would suggest that the WFH movement would see a rise in sr. engineer salaries and a reduction in jr. engineers salaries, which we haven't seen.
What about all the time spent commuting? For all the drawbacks of working remotely, the amount of time/energy saved not commuting has to be the most significant. I get more 'focus time' where I can deeply concentrate when I work from home. If I have a commute, I feel frazzled and drained by the time I even step foot in the office.
It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility.
And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).
Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.
Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.
If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.
If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.
I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.
I will say this: as a person with ADHD, I, personally, am more productive in the office than I am at home. When I was hybrid, I'd go to the local library to work. That also helped.
It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute.
If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.
I’m the opposite too much noise and commotion in the office. Lots of people to talk to and others that stop by. WFH was much more efficient for me, even with distractions like interesting things at home and wife/kids.
That's great for whoever wants this to justify their fearful, uninspired, fashion-driven back to office policies, love that for them, I hope you get the company you deserve. I also hope all of your best people (read: most expensive) leave, because aren't these dumb decisions always done to prod people into leaving without paying out severance? See also: fiefdom-building by cowardly managers, "leaders" who hate their home life, etc.
I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.
From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_:
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on
How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.
By observing multiple people who have done either thing for 10+ years.
Sure, there might be lots of confounding factors, and it might not be causation at all. That's why the quote is from a speech, not a paper
Here's another quote, I don't know if it's from a speech or anything:
> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
> I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most.
Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
According to most big companies these days, "lone coder" is the peak of business efficiency!
You're basically restating exactly what he's saying.
You’re going to have lots of disgruntled naysayers, but this principle is 100% true.
The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.”
Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work.
Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app.
Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further.
There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.
@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"
full text:
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
I thought that the title drops the lede so I abreviated the second sentence of the abstract:
That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality.
It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity:
"We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. "
So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research.
For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.
> Imnsho this paper is very low quality
Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.
I think there is some room in between those two.
At a minimum you'd expect a few more companies, more sources than just code review and code productivity metrics (this alone disqualifies the study because it centers on just one task: software development) etc.
Which seems very consistent with everything I've seen over a fairly long career. I'd add not just co-workers but also other interactions with industry peers.
Where do companies otherwise prioritize long-run development over short-term output? In my experience, generally nowhere. So why would this make managers push RTO more?
Some who already want RTO may use this as an excuse, but I would think it would actually reduce RTO pressure overall, as it confirms less short-term productivity, which is what companies actually care about.
I think this will do exactly nothing for RTO, neither increase nor decrease the push from management.
The decisions around RTO seem to be more “gut feeling” based than data driven. Look at Amazon, a supposedly “data driven company”. During RTO, Andy Jassy admitted there’s no data to back it up but that they “believe” it will help due to improving culture.
Fast forward a year and they just did a first round of layoffs because “culture”. So I guess ultimately RTO was a failure for them that they won’t admit to.
RTO was always about reducing labor costs by incentivizing people to resign.
I think that is only part. The other part is pushback against "uppity" labour.
I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.
New to the company. Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people you wouldn’t normally run into in your corner of Slack, and pick up more info about how the company works.
> If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges.
In person accelerates onboarding for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s not a game of trust or “carrots”.
Why have managers and reviews and non-automated promotions and security groups if you trusted them enough to hire them...
Well because obviously that trust only goes so far.
The “if you trusted them enough to hire them you should trust them with everything unconditionally” meme is popular, but it’s a very weak argument.
Everyone has to build trust and establish a reputation at any job. Every company treats new employees as probationary, whether they make it explicit or not.
You don’t get hired into a company and immediately have the same trust level as the guy who has been there for 5 years and has a long history of delivering results.
For some issues with new employees you can pivot quickly: If you discover that someone is not good at interacting with databases and is causing downtime and restore from backup situations, you pivot quickly and remove their database privileges while you observe their skill growth.
With remote, you can’t pivot quickly. If you’re 12 weeks in and the new remote hire obviously can’t communicate remotely or focus at home, you can’t pivot quickly and have them work in the office most of the time because remote hires don’t necessarily live by the office. So it’s a slowly earned privilege in companies that aren’t remote-first.
I’m surprised this is a foreign concept. This was actually the common situation with remote work before COVID: Gaining WFH ability was something earned and negotiated over time. It wasn’t widely publicized, but that’s how many of us started working remote.
Building trust is a gradual thing. You give some, you get some, you do that long enough and you will have a lot of trust. You can still lose it all in a heartbeat. But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
'Trust comes on foot, but leaves by horse'.
I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
That only worked a couple hours a week and collected multiple paychecks? Probably not.
Sure, they hired duds. Just not that level of dud. And if they were, they found out much more quickly.
That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.
I say that hiring someone is not an absolute vote of confidence in a person. Even if someone is a veteran worker, most companies have a new employee orientation. Having a "probation period" where someone comes into the office to integrate and meet people and work more collaboratively makes sense to me.
Disclaimer: While I benefit and often like a remote work or hybrid setup, I also know that my career and my ability to absorb new technologies has been crippled by the isolation of remote work. And, my success and my level of knowledge in my field is directly attributed to being physically around a lot of people and several related departments in order to ask questions and mingle with experts.
Remote work sucks for learning, for me - and I know I'm not alone.
> This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
> Capital is something you expend
Or hoard
Cue the developers dismissing any evidence that RTO has benefits because they don’t like it.
That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.
The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...
In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.
As for the code review data they analyzed:
"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "
I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.
Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
At one job, when we moved into a new building, we very deliberately located the QA for our team an aisle or two away from the devs. When they said, "It did this", we would just walk over and say "Show me". That was often very enlightening. "Oh, I see, the step that you didn't write down in the bug report is..."
On the other side of the same floor would have been far enough to change the dynamic. And the building was not that big.
I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas.
Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.
Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.
All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.
> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office.
Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"
One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
This sounds like what PI planning is imagined to be in "safe".
This all vibes with what I observed during the pandemic myself, also in a Fortune 500 SV enterprise:
* Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree.
* Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills.
* The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence.
My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.
(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review.
Why is this here in the first page?
Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship...
All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
1 company? 2 buildings? Over < 5 years? Any evidence for "dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run" must be pretty sketchy.
To Quote the Page:
Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
I'd wait for the revision.
It's quite telling that this is nothing more than an abstract but it has gained votes so fast it hit the top link.
The abstract page has a link to the whole paper as a PDF:
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
how convenient for Meta.
And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"
Thanks. :) And yeah, I skimmed it. I stand by my comment.
The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?
It's probably pretty close to the Allen Curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve
Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
It's in the study, generally it's sitting close enough to converse
they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
This is fascinating, and possibly relevant to companies that hire for the long term. Unfortunately, that excludes most of corporate America.
In the current business environment, employees aren't people they're "jobs". As long as they're treated as "jobs" why do you care where they sit as long as "the job" gets done? In fact, you shouldn't care WTF they're doing at all as long as "the job" gets done! Money goes in and work gets done. Simple, right?
Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".
This work would suggest that the WFH movement would see a rise in sr. engineer salaries and a reduction in jr. engineers salaries, which we haven't seen.
Huh. Well, what's the average tenure at a company now?
Bureau of Labor Stats says: As of January 2024, the median tenure for all U.S. wage-and-salary workers was 3.9 years.
So that means we should all be working remotely, if productivity was the actual thing the capital & management classes were trying to solve.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current...
What about all the time spent commuting? For all the drawbacks of working remotely, the amount of time/energy saved not commuting has to be the most significant. I get more 'focus time' where I can deeply concentrate when I work from home. If I have a commute, I feel frazzled and drained by the time I even step foot in the office.
It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility.
And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).
Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.
Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.
If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.
I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.
I will say this: as a person with ADHD, I, personally, am more productive in the office than I am at home. When I was hybrid, I'd go to the local library to work. That also helped.
It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute.
If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.
I've been remote for 5 years at faang. It's ridiculous they haven't fired me yet. The productivity hit from remote work is huge.
For self-contained coding exercises remote is fine. AI does all that now but I guess I still need to prompt it.
Getting myself impactful projects, winning turf wars, new collaboration with a cousin team? Forget it. Impossible from home.
I’m the opposite too much noise and commotion in the office. Lots of people to talk to and others that stop by. WFH was much more efficient for me, even with distractions like interesting things at home and wife/kids.
Libraries or cafés for me, I need some kind of outer stimuli to keep me going.
Most offices unfortunately drain my will to live real fast.
Maybe if we tried to build offices what people enjoy spending time in...
That's great for whoever wants this to justify their fearful, uninspired, fashion-driven back to office policies, love that for them, I hope you get the company you deserve. I also hope all of your best people (read: most expensive) leave, because aren't these dumb decisions always done to prod people into leaving without paying out severance? See also: fiefdom-building by cowardly managers, "leaders" who hate their home life, etc.
I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.