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.
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.
Peopleware[0] taught us this in 1987 already.
It's not complicated how teams should be located physically, but corporations refuse to learn and try to reinvent something every time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
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.
Not to simplify too much, but I think it comes down to accountability and responsibility.
I've worked remotely with a team where everyone was very engaged, saw similar shared goals to work towards and everyone took accountability for doing work to reach that.
I've also worked remotely with people who basically barely noticed the work everyone else even did, nor cared, nor appreciated it. There was a sense of, let's just get any interactions over with and go back to our doing the minimum we can to not get fired.
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".
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:
We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.> 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.
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.
Because the C-suite needs to justify those 15-year commercial leases, and anything with a veneer of credibility will be used to do so (in addition to simply firing people who don't comply).
> So why would this make managers push RTO more?
> Proximity [office] *increases* development
Do you seriously expect managers to read anything beyond title?
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”.
This is nonsensical. Most F500 companies are globally distributed. Most of onboarding is gaining access to systems.
It’s far easier and more efficient to search slack, find the person you need to talk to and DM them in your first week than it is to pester the person who sits next to you to figure out how to click the right Sailpoint buttons.
> Being in-person makes it easier to build new relationships, make friends with people
Critically, this is impossible if most of the team is already remote. You're not going to make the new guy sit around the office by himself right?
I think hybrid is where we'll end up once the dust settles. Avoiding the daily commutes, but a couple days a week makes a lot of sense.
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.
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.
> But you're never going to get the keys to the kingdom on day #1.
I always tell juniors that even if their company doesn't have an explicit probationary period, they should assume their behavior and results are being carefully monitored for the first year to watch for signs of a bad hire.
Hiring someone is never equivalent to having full trust in them. Reputations don't start at 100% on day 1, they start as a neutral value that you need to build up over time. You also need to avoid breaking it down. It's much faster to destroy a reputation than build it up.
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
> 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.
> A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons
So how come those who can handle it are being punished?
Valid question, but it's quite obvious: The shift to WFH was sudden and rushed, so now the number of people who need to be brought back in the office is huge.
You can't go through a company and retroactively subtract a benefit from ~half of the people without getting completely buried under discrimination lawsuits from angry people who think you forced them into the office but let Bob WFH because you're illegally discriminating.
So the companies are changing the policy for everyone and then granting "exceptions" on a case by case basis going forward, using newly defined criteria.
Again, please don't downvote the messenger. I'm just describing what's happening, not saying I approve.
I mean, layoffs are always sudden and rushed, but companies don't seem to mind thrusting people into that new situation. Also, I'm sorry, but we've had about six years to figure this out (i.e. to get Zoom volume licensing). Any company that hasn't figured out how to set up a VPN and video chat by now is uh... slow.
> 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.
Is my remote experiences strange or do other remote workers not have some sort of chat where people ask if you've got a minute and drop in a video conference link if they need a quick chat on something?
No idea, but yes, that's exactly how we do it. We've been full remote since COVID and honestly, I don't think any of us would want it any other way but we're a very small team so not representative of larger trends.
> Capital is something you expend
Or hoard
Cue the developers dismissing any evidence that RTO has benefits because they don’t like it.
This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:
1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,
2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),
3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,
4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and
5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.
Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.
The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.
In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.
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.
> [has benefits]
Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?
Nobody's stopping you from commuting an hour each way into a beige box with the coldest fluorescent lighting ever. If you really want to inhale someone else's rhinovirus, by all means, be my guest! Just don't force me to do the same.
> 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"
Off-the-shelf AI can replace workers in their twenties and AI fine-tuned over a few months for your company's needs can replace workers in their forties. Problem solved!
If an alien was reading many of the comments here, before they knew much about the world, they’d probably first believe that working from office is this new fangled idea that had never existed before.
Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc.
Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way.
This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.
The thing is that office can be very different environment. I have my own office at current workplace. But I was sitting in 20 seat open office too. People were hiding in the toilets to do some coding…
During COVID, studies supporting working from home leading to higher productivity were highlighted. Now when companies want people to come back, studies supporting working in an office producing higher productivity are highlighted. Funny how that works and this post is already 100+ points.
*cant wait to see those down votes for this comment
It's called consent manufacturing
Kind of wild that people don't just do both. Let your reports who want to sit in traffic commute to the office, and let the ones who don't want to do that work from home. Problem freakin' solved. Where's my Nobel prize?
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.
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.
Precisely why we do:
* No Mail Mondays. Engineers are deep in the code and are not disturbed other than the on-call. Engineers are expected to have a stack of work they can make the progress on if they get stuck. These days are in-office.
* Work from Home Wed: Coordinated work from home day. This forces everyone to be available online, and nobody is missing in-person meetings. Response times expected to be quick in slack.
While not perfect, and we do have some employees that struggle with output on WFH days, this is far more productive than 5 straight days in office.
I like this kind of thinking. I wonder though if you're paying as much attention to see who's "struggling with output" on Tues, Thurs, and Fri?
As in, are you skeptical of WFH and looking for downsides, or does your particular team just work better with more time in the office? I only ask because it's foreign to me; offices completely destroy my focus and I don't know how anyone does it.
(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review.
Why is this here in the first page?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't really understand why the commute always comes up as an argument in the WFH/RTO slapfights. How is your commute anyone's fault but your own? Could you not choose to live walking distance from work? Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid? If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute?
That's all besides the point I am making... All things being equal, why is remote work not better for the employer as well as employee? Less commute=more energy and better focus=increased efficiency (I get much more work done at home than in an office). At the same time the employer doesn't need to provide as much real estate space, so it's not only more efficient, but cheaper. The only advantage seems to be control/authority? In what way is having employees in office preferable. Most of my meetings are with teams that are geographically dispersed anyways. Is it really any more effective to take a Zoom call in an office vs at my desk at home?
>How is your commute anyone's fault but your own?
I generally can't control housing prices, and whenever I suggest building more, the ire of the entire landed gentry class is directed into a singularity centered on my forehead.
>Could you not choose to live walking distance from work?
With housing prices being insane? No. There are like 12 different policy failures that make it impossible to live much closer to work than people already do, and it's only getting worse as rural America hollows out and people move to cities where there are amenities, like cafes and hospitals.
>Why is it the company's fault you moved three hours out to a low-COL area during covid?
Because these companies said we could? Why are you so quick to blame employees who would be destitute without a job, whereas these behemoth companies could fire everyone and just do nothing with their capital for ten years and be fine? People are just trying to get by and survive, and you're blaming them?
>If your org is going RTO and you want to stay with them, couldn't you just, ya know, reduce your commute?
Sure, I'll just get the magic "property price go down" wand.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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".
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 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?
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
Nothing makes me write code better than desk lunch mouth noises. Oh, and that one guy who has an annoying, noisy habit he's in denial about.
It's probably pretty close to the Allen Curve.
This topic definately resonates with Thomas Allen's Managing the flow of technology (he was a great prof and all-around nice human being).
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.
Currently sitting in an open office floor plan surrounded by 4 other developers less than 3 feet away speaking in Hindi. I don't speak Hindi. There are constraints to this open door distraction.
So, when are we forbidding teams to have members in different offices?
I must have also missed the email telling everything about the re-org so that teams will only need to work with other teams in their proximity
I used to work for a company that was so vehemently against remote work, except we had three different offices (a main and two satellites). My boss and I never lived in the same state during my entire tenure. Somehow, we managed just fine, even if we were both forced to sit in traffic every day, just so we could... video chat from an expensive office building. (Of course, we had to justify some very expensive remodels, too... but I'm sure that's just a coinkydink.)
From personal experience after working 4 years remotely, I started going to the office three days a week, and while efficiency per day is definitely smaller, we achieve much better results much faster, just because we can solve a lot of problems just where we are, without scheduling meetings or waiting for people to answer. Not to mention how much more I personally learn from my colleagues.
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.
Does the industry even have as much junior folks as it used to? Because cutting them, or not hiring them in the first place, is an alternative to lowering their salaries.
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.
> winning turf wars, new collaboration with a cousin team
Get a life, bro.
Did you miss the part about me being remote for 5 years?
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.
See, I do remember that when I was in the office pre-COVID. It was annoying.
The thing is, though, is most days, it's just me and my manager working at the office. Pretty much all of my teammates are in India, or are somewhere else in the US/CAN. We do have an intern but he's not here most days. As a result, it's basically me driving to the office to host meetings with people who, unless they buy plane tickets, cannot come by my desk to bother me.
So I've got that part of it going for me, which is nice.
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...
Paraphrasing. Closed doors (focused work) lets you reach local minimum faster. Open doors (More connections) lets you escape local minimums.
I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas.
Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.
This is exactly the right framing and that was going to be the same quote I chose (go far together…)
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.
True, but it doesn't change the fact that in 2025 an engineer with a closed door but ethernet and cell connectivity is still likely to be inundated with a continuous stream of notifications and other forms of electronic correspondence with his peers.
put another way, I'm getting exposed to hundreds of ideas and people -- and probably 40% bots -- just being on HN
a researcher in 1971 could maybe get yesterday's news via newspaper, or maybe radio -- but if they're closed door they're focusing, so they hear nothing else.
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 those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
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.
Keep your eyes open for a better job? The work you do should have impact of some kind. In the corporate world there is business impact (increase revenue, decrease direct costs or improve system efficiency), social impact (make a product that directly helps people in some way), or personal impact (work on something that you find intrinsically interesting or helps you grow your skills or understanding).
I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
> I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality
Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months.
What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”.
I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line.
The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.
> Keep your eyes open for a better job?
This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.
To be fair, a lot of academic productivity is just publish-or-perish.
Doors? All I’ve ever known were cubicles and open office plans. What world is this where offices have doors?
I had an office with a door multiple times in my (early) career. An open office door is a universe away from sitting in an open office. Even when everyone has their doors open, a true office setup allows for plenty of focus.
On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again.
Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
I was being facetious while pointing out that Office Plans only have doors to the floors and conference rooms. Even the bathrooms lack doors now where they have designed it so you can't see inside from the hallway.
Early in my career, we had offices, with doors, that you could close. Earlier in my career we still were writing Flash ActionScript. I wasn't asking about what it was like back in the old days where offices had doors. I was being cheeky about the fact that someone decided they weren't effective at bringing the "pod" together like it's some sort of nursery for software or day care for adults.
It's been a strange ride.
Post WW2 times. The dude was born in 1915, this quote is just a copium for romantics.
doors are for closers
I love Richard Hamming but
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on
Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking.
Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused.
Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).
When I was piecing together how I got to be a relatively young lead developer, it came down to my open door policy. I essentially rediscovered Hamming's wisdom just by extending a policy that started with my college roommate who was struggling with our CS homework. That lead to me helping other kids in the computer lab (with C/C++ bugs, not with the algorithms), and if you have skills at <5YOE you're going to use them at work if you can, because what else can you do to not look like a newb?
But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role.
Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.
> But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door.
This makes me think of people hanging out on Slack. But then the interruptions are constant if you keep an eye on it.
You don’t have to reply instantaneously. Just soon.
And if you want to e a lead or principal, better learn to organize your work into little atoms that you can checkpoint because you’re gonna a get interrupted. A lot.
Seems very simple, working more with people than with problems gets you more social capital; people gonna remember someone helping them with something relatively trivial directly more than "they saw a bunch of code commited regularly".
Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.
Devs listen to who they trust. And how can you trust that worker you never work with?
> 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.
> Well Hamming observed it.
I observe so many ways to have known and unknown bias in this I call any outcomes cow manure.
The quote makes a statement, we don't know if it is true. What can you learn from that? It might spark some thoughts, maybe.
Bro, you literally provided zero evidence, learn what?
> 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!
It is. If you have defined end goal.
But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved.
day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work
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.
Idiots run things for a lot of reasons.
Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.
Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.
Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
> Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners?
Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.
The principle applies to a world where people work in offices doing serious long term R&D work. The quote is entirely irrelevant to people in working open offices for projects that change direction quarterly building features designed to make PMs look busy.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
This feels so pretentious. People can keep it closed or open for whatever reason they want, and it has no correlation to how they solve problems or learn.
Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.
Richard Hamming’s second most famous quote:
> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that
Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.
Also:
> 10 years
Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
> They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.
"psychics": pun intended? ;-)