[tidepod12]

>Also the personality type matrix of people who chose to work from home is different from the general population -- of course those people have higher wfh productivity

My experience is the complete opposite. I spent a lot of time at a very large company that has always had a "WFH if you want" policy. By and large, the highly productive people were doing a hybrid work-from-office 3-4 days a week and WFH 1-2 days a week. In contrast, the people who self-selected into always WFH were almost exclusively slackers who took advantage of the situation to watch Netflix or sit at the pool all day and get nothing done.

I know it's just an anecdote, but I think it's important because this is probably what executives are most worried about. It doesn't take very much effort to find people posting on Twitter that they love WFH during COVID because it means they get to sit at the beach all day. I've got people on my own timeline that choose WFH because they see it as a chance to slack off without supervision.

A single slacker on a dev team of 5-10 can completely ruin the team's output, and (speaking from experience) it's really hard to prevent, oversee, or correct a slacker situation remotely. You might say "then fire them if they're a slacker", but once you're at the point where you're ready to fire them, the damage and lost productivity has already been done.

[kyleee]

Honestly sounds like a failure of management if slackers are able to keep up appearances for long enough to cripple entire team efforts.

[tidepod12]

It has nothing to do with "keeping up appearances". The slackers are easily and quickly identified (usually just from the indicator that they chose to WFH 100% of the time). The problem is that, as I mentioned, it is ridiculously hard to remotely correct a slacker situation even after it has been identified.

[kyleee]

so everyone knows the problem people, but it's hard to sanction/fire them? again sounds like managment/organizational failure. Surely judging performance of WFH employees and making efforts to help them is a surmountable management problem

[tidepod12]

Have you ever worked in a management position at a decent sized company? Firing someone is not an easy task. Unless it's an egregious case (violation of laws/policy, sexual assault, etc), firing someone, even someone that literally produces zero work product, can take months or even a year. That's a slacker that is going to sit on your payroll, disrupting your teams flow, and eating your budget for months/a year while you build your case for firing.

Then, even after you fire them (or let's even say by some miracle you were able to fire them quickly), it costs a lot of money and time to hire someone new. That's yet more time and budget that isn't going into your team, and your team is also a person short while you go through the process of hiring and then training.

It is leagues and leagues better for "the slacker situation" to not be a problem at all, and it is much less likely to be a problem if prospective slackers aren't given the opportunity to slack off at home to begin with.