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 "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.
We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.Or hoard
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.
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
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.
> 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”.
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.
And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"
All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.
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?
> 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.
Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
Why is this here in the first page?
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 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 doesn't show much benefit which is the 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)
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.
ilc•36m ago
Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
I'd wait for the revision.
Clent•21m ago
delichon•19m ago
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...