Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study.
>>Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on my team, and it is the single biggest factor that makes me somewhat receptive to going back into the office. It's easier to draw a line between work and home that way.
Maybe we should just turn Slack off altogether outside of business hours, and only enable it in emergencies. LOL
Interesting. This contradicts the prevailing HN sentiment that WFH increases productivity because there's less time spent socializing or dealing with distractions.
Maybe if you do nothing but greenfield coding, but when does that ever happen? You'd need to be in a startup or a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years.
I brought up concerns about WFH productivity once in another thread and quickly realized that many people on here do not want to discuss the facts and only want to consider anecdotal evidence in favour of WFH.
I'm glad to see that there are studies being published that show how certain companies are actually doing, rather than a handful of people loudly saying "my group is equally as productive WFH so no one should work from offices". I don't think those people are going to be so happy as more research is published and company leaders realize what is happening to productivity.
Yes, this was my concern with applying the lessons more broadly. I would love to see a similar assessment for a company that was substantially staffed from other locations to see how much this is a universal picture or not.
I can't mention the company, but I was told from someone at a very large financial company in the US that their productivity tanked over the last year. I won't be surprised if this is generally the case for WFH.
So you heard from a second-hand source that productivity at a bank tanked, and that's making you think that negative WFH productivity is the norm? Maybe base your opinions off a little more information than a friend's story.
> Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments.
From article:
"The company that provided data is one of the world’s largest IT services companies. They have over
150,000 employees who work with clients across the globe. Most work in the home country, a rapidly-
developing Asian nation."
This is about a half-assed Indian "IT Services" company. (From where I am. Need to specify lest I also be branded as racist white dude or whatever). So there is hardly anything to learn in general. Of course similar type IT companies can learn that their lazy micro-managers need to do even more micro managing to get anything done.
The only thing I learned is that one can get even prestigious institution like University of Chicago to do shady shit if there is enough money to motivate.
Imagine observing lower productivity in HCL, Wipro, Tata, Techmahindra. Having worked with all of them I assume detecting lower productivity would require a mirror to see if they were breathing.
I have been unfortunate enough to be "diagnosed" with ADHD at a young age. Oh how strange it is that a child can't concentrate with 25 of his peers hopping and chatting around him, let's medicate him as soon as possible! /rant off
Well, a few years ago I rented an office space with a friend of mine, just the two of us in a very spacious (100m2), light and well-ventilated office. We received no phone calls, there were no people walking in, or cats and girlfriends asking for attention. I had less distractions than I had at home, and much less than in a traditional office. And it was a dedicated area for "work". A comfortable desk and chair, two monitors and a fast pc.
All these factors made it so much easier to concentrate and get into the flow... If I had to put a number on it I'd say I would be at least 1.5x more effective working in an area like that compared to a traditional office or at my desk at home.
I will NEVER again say that I am someone who has trouble concentrating, having worked in a place like that.
I wonder if (and how much) the lack of a proper workplace explains the decrease in output when working from home in this study. I can imagine a decrease in productivity if you have to share your home and workplace with other people or even children... But when your children and partner are at work, or if you have a seperate workspace, I wonder how the two compare then.
I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do the thing no matter how much I want to."
It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try."
It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice."
It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."
It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks.
If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD.
I haven't been diagnosed and don't know where to start. One of my teachers had suggested in early grade school that I had a "developmental disability" but my parents resisted and prevented me from being assessed and prevented me from being in the special needs program. Partially because they didn't really believe in the concept and partially because they feared that it would negatively affect my social development.
I struggled throughout school, struggled even harder throughout university (it took me _many_ years to graduate) and am currently floundering in my job.
I have had the exact same experience with my taxes/laundry/reports but I have no family doctor and no way to get one. Besides a GP, the mental health options for such things in my city are limited to minors and adults in assisted living situations.
See a psychiatrist, if it's an option. They'll ask you to do one or more diagnostic questionnaires, I was given the Weiss functional impairment scale and the CADDRA questionnaire to fill out. Your partner or a close acquaintance will also be required to answer some questions to give an outside view. Answer as honestly as possible (there's no effort at blinding so it's embarrassingly easy to guess the 'right' answers... they really need to work on this).
I don't know about other countries but in Australia if you meet the criteria on the above questionnaires and your psychiatrist's assessment agrees with that then you'll likely be prescribed stimulant medication (Ritalin or dexamfetamine, or the long acting variants Concerta or Vyvanse). I started on dexies and while not everyone's so lucky, for me they were life changing. I can sit down and choose to do a thing... and just do the thing! It's the first time in my life I've been able to do that. I was surviving before but... life just doesn't have to be that hard.
> "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."
This is why I learned more about grain bins and low-head dams this week than I did the tool I was supposed to be building.
Ooh did you know grain bins are super dangerous and there's a startup building a grain-bin-leveling robot so that farmers don't have to risk death in their grain bins?
Yeah that wasn't what I was meant to be doing either.
Being unable to do things you should be doing might be ADHD, it might also be depression. Depressed people often live in clutter, piles of laundry, papers everywhere, because they cannot find the will to get and stay organized.
> Employees with children living at home increased hours workedmore than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than thosewithout children.
This tells you all you need to know about the study. You can't analyse the relative effectiveness of working from home and working in the office when you're conflating "remote work" with "trying to get something done on your laptop on the kitchen table while working from home due to the pandemic, while your two early-primary-school-aged kids, who you are simultaneously trying to home-school due to the pandemic, are running amok in the lounge room."
> Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did.
Of course, don't we all? It would be much more useful to have data on what remote work will be like in the future (i.e., when kids are in school/daycare).
There is something interesting about knowing the pros/cons of what happened during the pandemic, but most of the time research is done so that the conclusions can inform future decisions. Here, the future decisions about WFH would benefit from disentangling the WFH aspect from the COVID-induced remote school aspect.
One way to accomplish this is to assume that all workers who have kids (and lost productivity as a result) would have had the same productivity gains of people without kids. There are probably smarter/more nuanced ways to determine the global pros/cons of WFH in the future.
A study of unprepared people being locked at home without childcare or schooling, without time to setup an office and in companies in dissarray is about as representative of home working as people falling overboard the titanic are representatice of health benefits of swimming.
Similarly if a group of tourists gets lost in the jungle we don't call that a study of prehistoric tribal life.
I managed mixed in-office and WFH teams before the pandemic.
There was a stark productivity drop every summer when kids were out on summer break. This includes parents with dedicated home offices who had been WFH for many years.
The effect was so predictable that we planned for lower velocity during summer months. It was also common practice for WFH employees to spend more time in the office for more focus during summer months if they lived close enough.
That’s not to say that kids are the biggest WFH productivity killer. IMO the people who struggled most were the young people who thought they could travel around and work remotely because it doesn’t matter where they’re working from. It turns out it’s plainly obvious that they don’t get much work done when they’re away from home. But that’s another story.
Traveling and even just being new to a town is a huge time suck. Every errand takes twice as long because you don't just have to do it. You have to choose a place, find it, etc. I won't try to visit somewhere and work for less than three months.
There are two ways to make it work I just thought of. One is to have your errands taken care of. Maybe this is because you're visiting family and the groceries are already there. Or, you're rich enough (in that place at least) to pay for someone to do everything. The other big option is to be on tour. Travel in a big group where the work and the travel blend together and there's an efficiency in numbers.
> It turns out it’s plainly obvious that they don’t get much work done when they’re away from home. But that’s another story.
That's really interesting - I primarily work from a home office, but if I'm struggling to buckle down and get some documentation done, sometimes I'll head out to a random coffee shop and set up there for a while. It's easier to stay focused when the internet's just that bit slower...
Oddly enough in my locale, we plan for lower velocity during deer hunting season, and pretty much for the rest of the year after that, because people put off their vacations in case they get sick, and have to use up their vacation time at the end of the year.
My wife works for <large defense contractor>. Every December is this hilarious ritual of “when deferred projects contractually committed for the calendar year meets mandatory vacation time meets overtime caps”.
It's also summer, hotter and this lowers your productivity. I always noticed a big drop while at the office during the summer and people take vacations.
I worked in offices for over 15 years. Every summer, Fridays were a veritable ghost town. Coordination ground to a halt because of misaligned vacations. More time was lost due to company barbecues and picnics than during the winter months.
WFH isn’t the cause. It’s literally just summer itself.
Thats actually interesting, I'm young and decided to go for my first "work from anywhere" and it's been almost two years now and I'm living currently in forest, my internet is slow and not stable... previously was living on small island in a wooden garage next to the beach with unstable GSM connection and no AC and right before it in a fantastic apartament in big city centre with stuning view and best internet connection I ever had.
Based on my experience it doesn't really matter from where but how frequent you change the location as it demands re-organisation from scratch every time.
Big factor in productivity is how satisfied you are from your life in general. When you feel cool and happy then even spending less time will bring more "wise" results than just being "ok" in a own fantastic apartament while hiting a wall for entire day trying to attack a problem.
To add one more thing, I was most productive living in this garage, working maybe 4h per day while rest of my time spending on bicycle, hiking, diving or talking with locals.
At this time my team mates were miserable and while declaring as they working the 8h, effects were not satisfying.
This is because even when I was doing other non-technical activities my brain was de-stressing but slowely building solutions for problems which I was executing later on in code and generally speaking I was livng a dream life as a "traveler".
I remember reading on a different post (can't find it) that productivity went up sharply at the beginning of the pandemic-induced WFH trend, but then subsided over time. The thinking was that people were on their toes early on for fear of being viewed as a slacker, but then once they adjusted to WFH they relaxed. Maybe someone else saw this study...
Plus, pandemic made my work suddenly WFH on a project already underway, with coworkers I already knew, so we went into it with momentum, perhaps even greased by being suddenly free of meetings, brown bags, time taken forever birthday celebrations down the hall, etc.
Gradually, however, those projects finished and new began. Yet, those new projects lacked the momentum. The toll of zero socializing crept up.
Then, 8 months into pandemic, I started a new job at new company. Onboarding 100% remote. Have never met new coworkers in person. I definitely feel I’m flying blind, that coworkers don’t really understand what the others work on. But the corrosion is subtly happening at just about the speed of rust.
I miss the meetings, the brown bags, the casual chats in the hall, the conversation at lunch that make unexpected connections or spark ideas.
My takeaways:
1. WFH isn’t static; effect changes over time as projects turn over and new employees onboard.
2. The organizational effect of the difference between 100% vs. 75% WfH, as compared to 75% vs 50% WFH is NOT = 25%; some other logarithmic scale of corrosiveness is resulting as we move to higher % WFH. Personally, I think I’d be most productive at 50% WFH (2-3 days per week).
(PS-none of above relates to trying to WFH with kids; that’s just impossible and a completely different topic.)
An obvious possible explanation is that work from home was running on the momentum early on and once people started having to move on to new tasks and new projects work from home got in the way.
This doesn't really take into consideration that a lot of businesses/teams within orgs had to quickly pivot strategies due to market conditions. Scrapping plans and shifting priorities last minute, a.k.a. thrash, comes at a cost. So yes it's not totally surprising that people had to work more hours to accomplish a similar output
I hope people do not much from this study done in a single IT Service company based in India. One critically important thing to remember is they are "Outlay based" instead of "Outcome based". So things measured are hours billed, time-sheets filled and reports generated. What work got done and was it even half useful to client is of secondary importance at these companies.
I interviewed few years back so thing they ask it if person is married or have kids because they are likely to take more vacations.
I wish they actually detailed the company name. Because if they did and my guess is correct this company is getting hammered as J2EE/.net support model is collapsing. There were some very large layoffs in last few year even before Covid.
This study matches what I've heard from other companies, for what it's worth.
About a month ago I discussed productivity with someone at one of the large financial companies. They do pretty heavy tracking of employee productivity and noted a pretty significant decrease since everyone's gone WFH.
I don't think it's some other factor that caused this decrease for the company in the study. I'm pretty sure it's consistent across the board.
I voiced this a month or two ago in another thread about WFH, and warned people not to go off of anecdotal productivity claims (which is mostly where I've been seeing the "working from home is significantly better for everything") and got downvoted in to oblivion.
If a company seriously believes that developer productivity can be accurately tracked, why not directly tie compensation to it? It really shouldn't matter at all where work happens in this case.
On the other hand, if they only believe that productivity can only be accurately measured in secret then the "trackers" have some explaining to do in terms of the actual value they are adding to the organization.
Vitriolic discussion around this. I'm completely unsurprised. All the key findings are easy to see in my own group. People are working longer hours because they are unaccustomed to working from home near their gaming rigs, or are making up unproductive day hours that their kids interrupted. Its harder to drop in and get quick exchange of information, leading to more meetings, etc.
The danger is that people (c-suite) see this and think it can't be done. It can, but COVID was an imperfect laboratory for studying this.
I managed mixed WFH teams before COVID. It was widely understood that WFH was a productivity obstacle long before quarantines. We usually gave it as a perk to high performing employees who had already proven their ability to get things done and self-manage, or for exceptional employees who couldn’t or wouldn’t relocate near an office.
The idea that WFH is no different than in-office work didn’t really become popular until COVID.
Offices and in-person communication are unmatched for collaboration and communication efficiency. Any company doing work that requires significant collaboration (most tech companies of size) pays a price for WFH. For many companies that overhead is fine if accounted for and managed, but it’s still a price.
My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either.
50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offered the chance to WFH, and about 95% of them wound up doing WFH at least 3 days a week, rising to 5 days a week after a few months. The other 50% stayed in the office. The teams that went WFH and the other 50% don't work on the same projects or in the same location.
After about 6 months, we started looking at productivity metrics using a couple Pinpoint-like tools that we built. Simple metrics like: backlog change time, on-time delivery, workload balance, LOC/Checkins ratio, etc. We also tracked things like non-code calendar hours, time logging delays, and other non-development related activity.
Neither group knew what we were tracking or how often. The results were pretty clear as soon as 6 - 9 months in: WFH numbers sucked pretty hard. Everything was down across the board, and it seemed like WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks, their PR reject rate was as much as 40% higher than office-based devs.
Things were so bad that if COVID had not hit, we were going to abandon the idea of letting people WFH altogether outside of extreme circumstances.
We aren't a unique shop. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary - we're developing on a variety of web and RT device platforms, but doing the same stuff in similar ways as other companies. We have a pretty flat team structure, and teams have a lot of flexibility and decision-making power, which has always worked well for us.
However, it's clear to me and the other execs that WFH absolutely does not work for us.
Do you know anything about the tools/methodologies of the teams that went part WFH and the adjustments they made when changing up their workstyle?
For example, do you know things like whether meetings were held at their previously scheduled times, vs. whether people started shifting them around to "meet when we're all here", or whether conversations and decisions were pushed organizationally to be more public, visible, and documented, vs made by whoever was in the office, because they could have a hallway chat?
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works at a "remote-first" company, where even when the whole team is in the office, they'll typically meet through zoom/hangouts at their desks, and I have other friends who are "the remote person" on an in-office team. There's a huge gap in the experiences of those two, which is why I ask about those kind of factors in your experience.
Interesting data driven approach to the problem. Would you be available to share more details about aggregate outcomes in private? Curious if you were able to slice out common patterns.
This matches my experience as well: Measurably reduced velocity, noticeably higher rates of rejected PRs and broken builds, and a palpable worsening of productivity and team happiness.
The strangest part is that if you asked individual developers, they would insist that WFH made them more productive and increased their efficiency. Yet managers and the data universally agreed that the opposite was true.
There’s something about WFH that puts distance between individuals and the overall big picture reality in a way that makes these overall issues difficult to see from individual perspectives. It also slowed and dampened all of the feedback loops, giving people the wrong impression that they were working on the right thing or producing proper results until much later. We tried compensating with even more manager effort and over-the-top communication repetition to try to keep everyone informed but it didn’t really help.
There were a few exceptions of people who had identical levels of performance during WFH, but they generally achieved it with significantly more work and proactive communication. Those who struggled the most were juniors who felt like they fell through the cracks.
It’s a difficult topic to discuss on HN because few of us like to admit that WFH is, on average, a struggle for companies. No one likes the idea that WFH comes at a cost.
I fear a backlash coming for WFH based on data-points like these once politicians can safely backpedal on their social distancing stance. Had to work hard in the past to get from 1d WFH/week to 4d/w. Then, Covid turned this upside down and post-pandemic I might be back to square one
I think the core issue lies with alignment. Pre-Pandemic I structured my WFH in a way that non WFH-members aren't blocked/annoyed/disturbed/... by it. I knew I was the outlier and had to work extra to make it work for others.
This extra-work looks completely different when a whole corporation goes 100%-WFH and I assume most/no-one was prepared. It takes more than a headset and Zoom.
Whole-team productivity is laughable, but except management no one is even noticing it, because all other departments are equally slower.
This comment thread is one of the most interesting I've read in a long time.
My prior bias leans toward thinking WFH is not so bad for productivity, but I think you raise a really important point that I agree with:
Developers tend to focus on individual productivity at the expense of organisational productivity.
The latter is what actually matters, and that could very well necessitate slower individual pace, more checkins with other teams, project leads changing their mind more frequently, and so on.
Interesting point about what developers prefer vs. what the data shows. Developers also prefer command-line tools even though data indicates that GUIs are more productive.
From my first hand experience this generalization is wrong as it comes down to each individual developer.
We have highly skilled developers using vim and editing code very fast as well as other skilled developers using VS Code of Eclipse as plain text editors.
Less skilled developers usually think that text editors like vim improve their quality/speed because the very skilled developers use them whereas they‘re usually lacking knowledge for concepts and the language.
This leads to a double slowdown from less skilled developers struggling now with their editor and the work they‘re supposed to do.
It usually comes down to what each individual developer is comfortable with compared to what they think they should be using regardless if text or GUI based.
> It’s a difficult topic to discuss on HN because few of us like to admit that WFH is, on average, a struggle for companies.
These are all very contradictory hypotheses from presumed earlier assertions. I strongly suspect we're not analyzing the dynamics and variables at a sufficiently granular level to synthesize any useful hypotheses. I'm trying to reconcile a set of earlier assertions out of global corporate postures from these recent pronouncements that Covid-WFH (as opposed to true-WFH) leads to productivity declines.
If WFH is an intractable hit to productivity due to lack of butts in seats, then what is the salient difference from outsourcing / offshoring? If the productivity loss of the latter is simply more acceptable due to a cost differential, then we have thus established a clearing price for that productivity loss. Or are the positions not sufficiently similar to draw that parallel?
If so much fortuitous collaboration happens when on-prem that it becomes a compelling cited factor to go on-prem, then are we making the parallel assertion all the effort for planning is not capturing even a significant fraction of this fortuitous dynamic, much of our planning is compellingly guided by Organizational Physical Brownian Motion?
I don't have a strong preference either way. Pay me enough, I'll show up and do the work. But I cut my teeth in a consulting / professional services context where the WFH discussion was very different: pay a premium (weekly round-trip flights) to put butts in on-prem seats, or less for WFH-delivered skills.
From well over a hundred client engagements by now, my personal opinion is there is no one-size-fits-all unless leadership explicitly builds the organization for it. There are definitely different workers who thrive under the different models, and those who under-deliver and abuse their working conditions. It's an incredibly tough leadership decision. I think much of that decision hinges upon how well the organization is led and coordinated. I have observed from my set of clients that WFH done well requires disciplined teams who produce more communications artifacts internally and externally with other teams, and this longer-term tends to encourage more organizational flexibility (because the published information decouples from people and disseminates deeper and faster). For various reasons, on-prem tends to lead to an over-reliance upon verbal, tribal communication modalities in most organizations.
Would make a great write up. Interested in the details around what was changed in the company to support this hybrid approach. Also breakdown of devs first time WFH.
From my experience, office->hybrid doesn’t work well as the the staff don’t have the same level of support and processes don’t change to adjust to the change. My first year of WFH (nearly 7 years ago now) was a pretty rough adjustment even though I wanted to do it (glad I stuck with it).
Like most things in life, “Is WFH is more productive?”, “it depends”. Props for doing the experiment and sharing details.
Does your company help make remote work easier? I guess I could understand that if you took a group used to an office and then forced them to be remote there would be some struggles. I think effective remote work has a bit of a learning curve and needs some investment up front. I think you would need to believe the potential is there and worth chasing.
> However, it's clear to me and the other execs that WFH absolutely does not work for us.
The "for us" part is refreshing humble for HN comments; thank you for the details of your experience.
I spent about 10 years working on the campus of a very large tech company, and then another 10+ years working for different remote development teams. The remote teams that I have managed were in teams that were built from the ground up to be remote, generally in companies built from the ground up to be remote. And when I say "remote" I really mean "distributed." Hiring the people with the best skills and letting them work from wherever they happen to live rather than relocating them.
I assume in your study that you divided TEAMS into WFM or office based, and did not have teams comprised of some people working remotes and some in the office?
I think that some people are wired to work effectively in distributed teams, some are not. Some managers have the "online social intelligence" to lead distributed teams, some do not. Taking a group of people attracted to working in an office or a high tech campus, and having them "work from home" while the rest of the company is still based in the office does not seem likely to work, though I am surprised by the starkness of your findings.
What happened during covid? I assume for sometime you all went remote. Was there a difference in productivity between teams? Did the team with wfh experience lag behind?
I mean I trust you got the numbers on whatever metrics you thought you've measured, but I don't buy that this is a well designed human experiment and your conclusions sufficiently exclude alternative explanations.
First systemic bias in your study is that instrumentation of only IC productivity; if IC productivity could exist in isolation, we wouldn't need managerial functions to begin with.
Alternative explanation; distributed work shifts some heavy lifting from the self-organization of ICs to managers actually doing successful multi-party coordination. Most managers suck, therefore they couldn't handle the true test of their function. But having exclusive access to $product-leads@ circle, they could shift blame.
To add more; if productivity was that significantly low for some folks for 6-9 months, and your managers couldn't steer it, that points to a general leadership problem than an IC problem.
Second problem is not having a logical continuity between your IC metrics and business metrics. Did 40% increase in PR rejection rate of half of your developers slowed down any of your business metrics by 20%? E.g release delays, post-release bug counts, decreased reliability etc. If not, then you weren't really measuring what you thought you were measuring.
Alternative explanation; the seat warming, busy work pressure is higher when at the office in the physical presence of peers, which blows up the metrics without meaningful output; WFH makes it much more easy to cut through bullshit work, bullshit meetings etc. Until you can prove that the business output suffered proportionally, metrics like "WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks" is meaningless. I am not even talking about how hard of a problem it is to really measure "time on dev-task". Sometimes taking a walk in the park to think through a problem is a dev task.
To get a proper picture, you'd need to be able to reject the alternative hypotheses with a greater strength. I think you also need to seriously look into the manager metrics; e.g. how do devs rate them as being able to communicate external priorities and requirements successfully, how many of them think they are working on redundant or meaningless work, that their code complexity is slowing them down etc. Not only these organizational bugs are much more expensive than small-but-easy-to-measure stuff like PR rejection rates, it is also more likely to be in your blindspot because you only interact with managers.
It is odd that no one attempted to improve the situation when the metrics started to decline for the WFH group. The only way I could see this happening if the metrics didn't have much correlation with actual results. Presumably this is a real business after all and actual results matter.
Personally I am a little skeptical however since everything sounds so contrived.
My company (listed in the LSE) started measuring WFH productivity as soon as Covid started. The unstated objective was to demonstrate WFH reduced productivity, to have an argument to force everybody to go back to the office once the pandemic ended. Metrics were devised by the senior leadership team to serve their purpose. We (dev managers) were tasked with collecting these metrics. After 4-5 months all metrics improved across all teams, so the senior leadership team decided to change them. These new metrics improved as well, so the project was stopped and data was destroyed (lest ICs would find out and have arguments to WFH after the pandemic). Now they’ve started talking about our great office in city center, about the gym, the gaming room, the Friday drinks, the office vibe.
The way that your particular study was conducted might be interesting from a study standpoint but it doesn't match the typically accepted ways of doing agile development. For instance if you were studying metrics but not releasing those metrics immediately back to the Developers then there is no opportunity for them to improve from a feedback loop. This seems like a strong invalidation of the study itself.
Hard truth coming in: The reason it doesn't work for your company is simply poor management (don't take it personally). What you actually measured is the ability of yourself and the rest of your managers to lead your teams in a situation when actual leadership is required.
You see most "managers" aren't really managing anything. "Coordinating" might be a better word. The problem is that coordinating is really just "managing without leadership", and in a WFH environment coordination alone isn't enough. You need people driving your teams, not sitting shotgun with the map reading off directions.
I think the most revealing question is a simple one: What metrics did you come up with to measure the productivity of your managers (and yourself) during this time? None? Of course not... You've probably heard the phrase that "managers are force-multipliers!". Does that apply when the multiplier is less than 1?
I am not disputing your results or even your conclusion, but it's important to know why you got the results you did. And even more important is accurately identifying the appropriate policy going forward: With your current management team you cannot continue with a WFH policy.
This is exactly the experience we are having, especially on new projects.
I’m starting to wonder if this is a high/low tech issue - maybe WFH works great for tasks that are common but not particularly challenging technically. I can tell you point blank that ASIC, systems, etc. work WFH is super broken when people can’t get face to face on a whiteboard or otherwise.
Working from home alone is nice the first couple of weeks. Then it becomes boring. Motivation to work decreases significantly. Level of trust to other (mostly new never seen) colleagues become zero.
Compassion to the company seizes to exist.
Connection to the product, vision and the general 'us' feeling is completely gone.
No team spirit, no fun.
Yes working from home isn't (in many cases) a big success in the long term.
I'm happy to report that my productivity has steadily decreased over the last four years. I credit this to becoming a parent, picking up more hobbies, and working from home. And yet, my compensation has doubled during that time. I really have very little to complain about these days. It's great!
Comparing office work with a WFH situation when kids are at home is unfair - apples to oranges. If you were in the office, where would your kids be? Who would take care of them?
If you want a fair comparison, compare to a situation when you bring your kids to the office.
But no one is doing that, right?
WFH works fine if your kids are where they are supposed to be normally: school, daycare, kindergarten, with nanny or with your spouse.
If they can't be taken care of for some reason (e.g. they are ill), you'd be forced to take a leave if you didn't have WFH possibility. So your productivity would be exactly 0. Now with WFH and kids at home maybe you'd not manage to get top productivity, but it would be still greater than 0. So overall it is a net win, even when taking kids into account.
How on earth are you supposed to get meaningful data from a report like this? Does nobody understay the attendant mental health strain of being in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. The fear uncertainty and complete disconnect from family and friends in many cases? And even outside of a pandemic, why should productivity be measured in just work output? Wouldn't it make more sense to look at overall mental health, work/life balance, stress etc? It's widely accepted that workplace stress is increasing, or was before COVID. We're about overdue to try and tackle that surely, before we face a new epidemic of mental health breakdown?
Having worked with a few large IT services companies, I’d question their definition of “productivity”. I suspect it’s related to Jira tickets completed or short term revenue (eg billable hours). I doubt it’s measured in terms of end user outcomes.
My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run.
For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread>>Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
Maybe we should just turn Slack off altogether outside of business hours, and only enable it in emergencies. LOL
This applies equally to whether wfh or in office.
For me, my son is 9 and my wife was partially at home. No big deal for my productivity. For my sister, she sold her car and hired a nanny for a year.
Like a FAANG? Well at least, the F and and the G do.
I'm glad to see that there are studies being published that show how certain companies are actually doing, rather than a handful of people loudly saying "my group is equally as productive WFH so no one should work from offices". I don't think those people are going to be so happy as more research is published and company leaders realize what is happening to productivity.
They're all from the same Asian company, it's far from clear.
From article:
"The company that provided data is one of the world’s largest IT services companies. They have over 150,000 employees who work with clients across the globe. Most work in the home country, a rapidly- developing Asian nation."
This is about a half-assed Indian "IT Services" company. (From where I am. Need to specify lest I also be branded as racist white dude or whatever). So there is hardly anything to learn in general. Of course similar type IT companies can learn that their lazy micro-managers need to do even more micro managing to get anything done.
The only thing I learned is that one can get even prestigious institution like University of Chicago to do shady shit if there is enough money to motivate.
Work from Home and Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154368 - May 2021 (131 comments)
Well, a few years ago I rented an office space with a friend of mine, just the two of us in a very spacious (100m2), light and well-ventilated office. We received no phone calls, there were no people walking in, or cats and girlfriends asking for attention. I had less distractions than I had at home, and much less than in a traditional office. And it was a dedicated area for "work". A comfortable desk and chair, two monitors and a fast pc.
All these factors made it so much easier to concentrate and get into the flow... If I had to put a number on it I'd say I would be at least 1.5x more effective working in an area like that compared to a traditional office or at my desk at home.
I will NEVER again say that I am someone who has trouble concentrating, having worked in a place like that.
I wonder if (and how much) the lack of a proper workplace explains the decrease in output when working from home in this study. I can imagine a decrease in productivity if you have to share your home and workplace with other people or even children... But when your children and partner are at work, or if you have a seperate workspace, I wonder how the two compare then.
It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try."
It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice."
It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."
It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks.
If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD.
/rant
I struggled throughout school, struggled even harder throughout university (it took me _many_ years to graduate) and am currently floundering in my job.
I have had the exact same experience with my taxes/laundry/reports but I have no family doctor and no way to get one. Besides a GP, the mental health options for such things in my city are limited to minors and adults in assisted living situations.
I don't know about other countries but in Australia if you meet the criteria on the above questionnaires and your psychiatrist's assessment agrees with that then you'll likely be prescribed stimulant medication (Ritalin or dexamfetamine, or the long acting variants Concerta or Vyvanse). I started on dexies and while not everyone's so lucky, for me they were life changing. I can sit down and choose to do a thing... and just do the thing! It's the first time in my life I've been able to do that. I was surviving before but... life just doesn't have to be that hard.
This is why I learned more about grain bins and low-head dams this week than I did the tool I was supposed to be building.
Yeah that wasn't what I was meant to be doing either.
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/robot-replace...
Ouch, got me with this one.
This tells you all you need to know about the study. You can't analyse the relative effectiveness of working from home and working in the office when you're conflating "remote work" with "trying to get something done on your laptop on the kitchen table while working from home due to the pandemic, while your two early-primary-school-aged kids, who you are simultaneously trying to home-school due to the pandemic, are running amok in the lounge room."
Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did.
Asking what happened in the real world, including in a range of work situations, is a very interesting question to ask.
Looking for/at the delta between optimal work-at-home and the office would also be interesting, for different reasons.
Of course, don't we all? It would be much more useful to have data on what remote work will be like in the future (i.e., when kids are in school/daycare).
There is something interesting about knowing the pros/cons of what happened during the pandemic, but most of the time research is done so that the conclusions can inform future decisions. Here, the future decisions about WFH would benefit from disentangling the WFH aspect from the COVID-induced remote school aspect.
One way to accomplish this is to assume that all workers who have kids (and lost productivity as a result) would have had the same productivity gains of people without kids. There are probably smarter/more nuanced ways to determine the global pros/cons of WFH in the future.
Similarly if a group of tourists gets lost in the jungle we don't call that a study of prehistoric tribal life.
There was a stark productivity drop every summer when kids were out on summer break. This includes parents with dedicated home offices who had been WFH for many years.
The effect was so predictable that we planned for lower velocity during summer months. It was also common practice for WFH employees to spend more time in the office for more focus during summer months if they lived close enough.
That’s not to say that kids are the biggest WFH productivity killer. IMO the people who struggled most were the young people who thought they could travel around and work remotely because it doesn’t matter where they’re working from. It turns out it’s plainly obvious that they don’t get much work done when they’re away from home. But that’s another story.
There are two ways to make it work I just thought of. One is to have your errands taken care of. Maybe this is because you're visiting family and the groceries are already there. Or, you're rich enough (in that place at least) to pay for someone to do everything. The other big option is to be on tour. Travel in a big group where the work and the travel blend together and there's an efficiency in numbers.
That's really interesting - I primarily work from a home office, but if I'm struggling to buckle down and get some documentation done, sometimes I'll head out to a random coffee shop and set up there for a while. It's easier to stay focused when the internet's just that bit slower...
It is pandemonium.
WFH isn’t the cause. It’s literally just summer itself.
Based on my experience it doesn't really matter from where but how frequent you change the location as it demands re-organisation from scratch every time.
Big factor in productivity is how satisfied you are from your life in general. When you feel cool and happy then even spending less time will bring more "wise" results than just being "ok" in a own fantastic apartament while hiting a wall for entire day trying to attack a problem.
To add one more thing, I was most productive living in this garage, working maybe 4h per day while rest of my time spending on bicycle, hiking, diving or talking with locals.
At this time my team mates were miserable and while declaring as they working the 8h, effects were not satisfying.
This is because even when I was doing other non-technical activities my brain was de-stressing but slowely building solutions for problems which I was executing later on in code and generally speaking I was livng a dream life as a "traveler".
Plus, pandemic made my work suddenly WFH on a project already underway, with coworkers I already knew, so we went into it with momentum, perhaps even greased by being suddenly free of meetings, brown bags, time taken forever birthday celebrations down the hall, etc.
Gradually, however, those projects finished and new began. Yet, those new projects lacked the momentum. The toll of zero socializing crept up.
Then, 8 months into pandemic, I started a new job at new company. Onboarding 100% remote. Have never met new coworkers in person. I definitely feel I’m flying blind, that coworkers don’t really understand what the others work on. But the corrosion is subtly happening at just about the speed of rust.
I miss the meetings, the brown bags, the casual chats in the hall, the conversation at lunch that make unexpected connections or spark ideas.
My takeaways: 1. WFH isn’t static; effect changes over time as projects turn over and new employees onboard. 2. The organizational effect of the difference between 100% vs. 75% WfH, as compared to 75% vs 50% WFH is NOT = 25%; some other logarithmic scale of corrosiveness is resulting as we move to higher % WFH. Personally, I think I’d be most productive at 50% WFH (2-3 days per week).
(PS-none of above relates to trying to WFH with kids; that’s just impossible and a completely different topic.)
I interviewed few years back so thing they ask it if person is married or have kids because they are likely to take more vacations.
I wish they actually detailed the company name. Because if they did and my guess is correct this company is getting hammered as J2EE/.net support model is collapsing. There were some very large layoffs in last few year even before Covid.
About a month ago I discussed productivity with someone at one of the large financial companies. They do pretty heavy tracking of employee productivity and noted a pretty significant decrease since everyone's gone WFH.
I don't think it's some other factor that caused this decrease for the company in the study. I'm pretty sure it's consistent across the board.
I voiced this a month or two ago in another thread about WFH, and warned people not to go off of anecdotal productivity claims (which is mostly where I've been seeing the "working from home is significantly better for everything") and got downvoted in to oblivion.
On the other hand, if they only believe that productivity can only be accurately measured in secret then the "trackers" have some explaining to do in terms of the actual value they are adding to the organization.
WFH during a global pandemic is not the same as WFH generally.
I say this as someone who has been remote for years.
Run this same study starting in September (barring huge Delta variant outbreak in the US) and you'll see a totally different set of numbers.
The danger is that people (c-suite) see this and think it can't be done. It can, but COVID was an imperfect laboratory for studying this.
The idea that WFH is no different than in-office work didn’t really become popular until COVID.
Offices and in-person communication are unmatched for collaboration and communication efficiency. Any company doing work that requires significant collaboration (most tech companies of size) pays a price for WFH. For many companies that overhead is fine if accounted for and managed, but it’s still a price.
50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offered the chance to WFH, and about 95% of them wound up doing WFH at least 3 days a week, rising to 5 days a week after a few months. The other 50% stayed in the office. The teams that went WFH and the other 50% don't work on the same projects or in the same location.
After about 6 months, we started looking at productivity metrics using a couple Pinpoint-like tools that we built. Simple metrics like: backlog change time, on-time delivery, workload balance, LOC/Checkins ratio, etc. We also tracked things like non-code calendar hours, time logging delays, and other non-development related activity.
Neither group knew what we were tracking or how often. The results were pretty clear as soon as 6 - 9 months in: WFH numbers sucked pretty hard. Everything was down across the board, and it seemed like WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks, their PR reject rate was as much as 40% higher than office-based devs.
Things were so bad that if COVID had not hit, we were going to abandon the idea of letting people WFH altogether outside of extreme circumstances.
We aren't a unique shop. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary - we're developing on a variety of web and RT device platforms, but doing the same stuff in similar ways as other companies. We have a pretty flat team structure, and teams have a lot of flexibility and decision-making power, which has always worked well for us.
However, it's clear to me and the other execs that WFH absolutely does not work for us.
Do you know anything about the tools/methodologies of the teams that went part WFH and the adjustments they made when changing up their workstyle?
For example, do you know things like whether meetings were held at their previously scheduled times, vs. whether people started shifting them around to "meet when we're all here", or whether conversations and decisions were pushed organizationally to be more public, visible, and documented, vs made by whoever was in the office, because they could have a hallway chat?
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works at a "remote-first" company, where even when the whole team is in the office, they'll typically meet through zoom/hangouts at their desks, and I have other friends who are "the remote person" on an in-office team. There's a huge gap in the experiences of those two, which is why I ask about those kind of factors in your experience.
The strangest part is that if you asked individual developers, they would insist that WFH made them more productive and increased their efficiency. Yet managers and the data universally agreed that the opposite was true.
There’s something about WFH that puts distance between individuals and the overall big picture reality in a way that makes these overall issues difficult to see from individual perspectives. It also slowed and dampened all of the feedback loops, giving people the wrong impression that they were working on the right thing or producing proper results until much later. We tried compensating with even more manager effort and over-the-top communication repetition to try to keep everyone informed but it didn’t really help.
There were a few exceptions of people who had identical levels of performance during WFH, but they generally achieved it with significantly more work and proactive communication. Those who struggled the most were juniors who felt like they fell through the cracks.
It’s a difficult topic to discuss on HN because few of us like to admit that WFH is, on average, a struggle for companies. No one likes the idea that WFH comes at a cost.
I fear a backlash coming for WFH based on data-points like these once politicians can safely backpedal on their social distancing stance. Had to work hard in the past to get from 1d WFH/week to 4d/w. Then, Covid turned this upside down and post-pandemic I might be back to square one
I think the core issue lies with alignment. Pre-Pandemic I structured my WFH in a way that non WFH-members aren't blocked/annoyed/disturbed/... by it. I knew I was the outlier and had to work extra to make it work for others.
This extra-work looks completely different when a whole corporation goes 100%-WFH and I assume most/no-one was prepared. It takes more than a headset and Zoom.
Whole-team productivity is laughable, but except management no one is even noticing it, because all other departments are equally slower.
My prior bias leans toward thinking WFH is not so bad for productivity, but I think you raise a really important point that I agree with:
Developers tend to focus on individual productivity at the expense of organisational productivity.
The latter is what actually matters, and that could very well necessitate slower individual pace, more checkins with other teams, project leads changing their mind more frequently, and so on.
From my first hand experience this generalization is wrong as it comes down to each individual developer.
We have highly skilled developers using vim and editing code very fast as well as other skilled developers using VS Code of Eclipse as plain text editors. Less skilled developers usually think that text editors like vim improve their quality/speed because the very skilled developers use them whereas they‘re usually lacking knowledge for concepts and the language. This leads to a double slowdown from less skilled developers struggling now with their editor and the work they‘re supposed to do.
It usually comes down to what each individual developer is comfortable with compared to what they think they should be using regardless if text or GUI based.
These are all very contradictory hypotheses from presumed earlier assertions. I strongly suspect we're not analyzing the dynamics and variables at a sufficiently granular level to synthesize any useful hypotheses. I'm trying to reconcile a set of earlier assertions out of global corporate postures from these recent pronouncements that Covid-WFH (as opposed to true-WFH) leads to productivity declines.
If WFH is an intractable hit to productivity due to lack of butts in seats, then what is the salient difference from outsourcing / offshoring? If the productivity loss of the latter is simply more acceptable due to a cost differential, then we have thus established a clearing price for that productivity loss. Or are the positions not sufficiently similar to draw that parallel?
If so much fortuitous collaboration happens when on-prem that it becomes a compelling cited factor to go on-prem, then are we making the parallel assertion all the effort for planning is not capturing even a significant fraction of this fortuitous dynamic, much of our planning is compellingly guided by Organizational Physical Brownian Motion?
I don't have a strong preference either way. Pay me enough, I'll show up and do the work. But I cut my teeth in a consulting / professional services context where the WFH discussion was very different: pay a premium (weekly round-trip flights) to put butts in on-prem seats, or less for WFH-delivered skills.
From well over a hundred client engagements by now, my personal opinion is there is no one-size-fits-all unless leadership explicitly builds the organization for it. There are definitely different workers who thrive under the different models, and those who under-deliver and abuse their working conditions. It's an incredibly tough leadership decision. I think much of that decision hinges upon how well the organization is led and coordinated. I have observed from my set of clients that WFH done well requires disciplined teams who produce more communications artifacts internally and externally with other teams, and this longer-term tends to encourage more organizational flexibility (because the published information decouples from people and disseminates deeper and faster). For various reasons, on-prem tends to lead to an over-reliance upon verbal, tribal communication modalities in most organizations.
From my experience, office->hybrid doesn’t work well as the the staff don’t have the same level of support and processes don’t change to adjust to the change. My first year of WFH (nearly 7 years ago now) was a pretty rough adjustment even though I wanted to do it (glad I stuck with it).
Like most things in life, “Is WFH is more productive?”, “it depends”. Props for doing the experiment and sharing details.
The "for us" part is refreshing humble for HN comments; thank you for the details of your experience.
I spent about 10 years working on the campus of a very large tech company, and then another 10+ years working for different remote development teams. The remote teams that I have managed were in teams that were built from the ground up to be remote, generally in companies built from the ground up to be remote. And when I say "remote" I really mean "distributed." Hiring the people with the best skills and letting them work from wherever they happen to live rather than relocating them.
I assume in your study that you divided TEAMS into WFM or office based, and did not have teams comprised of some people working remotes and some in the office?
I think that some people are wired to work effectively in distributed teams, some are not. Some managers have the "online social intelligence" to lead distributed teams, some do not. Taking a group of people attracted to working in an office or a high tech campus, and having them "work from home" while the rest of the company is still based in the office does not seem likely to work, though I am surprised by the starkness of your findings.
Why did it seem like this and how was it measured?
I mean I trust you got the numbers on whatever metrics you thought you've measured, but I don't buy that this is a well designed human experiment and your conclusions sufficiently exclude alternative explanations.
First systemic bias in your study is that instrumentation of only IC productivity; if IC productivity could exist in isolation, we wouldn't need managerial functions to begin with.
Alternative explanation; distributed work shifts some heavy lifting from the self-organization of ICs to managers actually doing successful multi-party coordination. Most managers suck, therefore they couldn't handle the true test of their function. But having exclusive access to $product-leads@ circle, they could shift blame.
To add more; if productivity was that significantly low for some folks for 6-9 months, and your managers couldn't steer it, that points to a general leadership problem than an IC problem.
Second problem is not having a logical continuity between your IC metrics and business metrics. Did 40% increase in PR rejection rate of half of your developers slowed down any of your business metrics by 20%? E.g release delays, post-release bug counts, decreased reliability etc. If not, then you weren't really measuring what you thought you were measuring.
Alternative explanation; the seat warming, busy work pressure is higher when at the office in the physical presence of peers, which blows up the metrics without meaningful output; WFH makes it much more easy to cut through bullshit work, bullshit meetings etc. Until you can prove that the business output suffered proportionally, metrics like "WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks" is meaningless. I am not even talking about how hard of a problem it is to really measure "time on dev-task". Sometimes taking a walk in the park to think through a problem is a dev task.
To get a proper picture, you'd need to be able to reject the alternative hypotheses with a greater strength. I think you also need to seriously look into the manager metrics; e.g. how do devs rate them as being able to communicate external priorities and requirements successfully, how many of them think they are working on redundant or meaningless work, that their code complexity is slowing them down etc. Not only these organizational bugs are much more expensive than small-but-easy-to-measure stuff like PR rejection rates, it is also more likely to be in your blindspot because you only interact with managers.
This 100%!
Personally I am a little skeptical however since everything sounds so contrived.
You see most "managers" aren't really managing anything. "Coordinating" might be a better word. The problem is that coordinating is really just "managing without leadership", and in a WFH environment coordination alone isn't enough. You need people driving your teams, not sitting shotgun with the map reading off directions.
I think the most revealing question is a simple one: What metrics did you come up with to measure the productivity of your managers (and yourself) during this time? None? Of course not... You've probably heard the phrase that "managers are force-multipliers!". Does that apply when the multiplier is less than 1?
I am not disputing your results or even your conclusion, but it's important to know why you got the results you did. And even more important is accurately identifying the appropriate policy going forward: With your current management team you cannot continue with a WFH policy.
This is exactly the experience we are having, especially on new projects.
I’m starting to wonder if this is a high/low tech issue - maybe WFH works great for tasks that are common but not particularly challenging technically. I can tell you point blank that ASIC, systems, etc. work WFH is super broken when people can’t get face to face on a whiteboard or otherwise.
Maybe you just realise that the vision and the 'us' feeling is fake.
If you want a fair comparison, compare to a situation when you bring your kids to the office. But no one is doing that, right?
WFH works fine if your kids are where they are supposed to be normally: school, daycare, kindergarten, with nanny or with your spouse.
If they can't be taken care of for some reason (e.g. they are ill), you'd be forced to take a leave if you didn't have WFH possibility. So your productivity would be exactly 0. Now with WFH and kids at home maybe you'd not manage to get top productivity, but it would be still greater than 0. So overall it is a net win, even when taking kids into account.
My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run.
For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.