[yafbum]

People need to stop using data as an excuse for making decisions, or apologizing for not having data, or arguing about the lack of data as an excuse for maintaining a status quo. As entrepreneurs, as managers, as individuals we make decisions with no perfect data all the time. It's called dealing with risk.

Sure you could get a sense for how much active coding time or whatever BS metric you can track, and look at correlation with WFH, but that stuff is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. How's new grad onboarding affected? How's team culture and conflict management affected? How is dealing with difficult health challenges affected? Working remotely is a big shift with likely long term longitudinal effects on an organization that are hard to predict. You can't A/B test or analyze your way out of every single decision there. So I respect people making decisions without data on this, that's what they're being paid the big bucks for. As I'm sure they will respect my decision to leave the minute the terms of the arrangement no longer suits me, which will add a data point of N=+1 somewhere.

It's ok to ask to see the data if you're curious. But people are often asking for data not out of curiosity but just because they disagree with the consequences of a decision that affects them. I think that's disingenuous. You could deploy a team of data scientists to tell me that the org will definitely be 5% more productive if everyone worked from some office an hour away, and it wouldn't really matter to me. I still prefer having a remote work option and I won't commute more than 40 min to work. We don't need to ask for data about things we don't like, we can just disagree and either commit or create the attrition outcomes that will drive different behaviors in the future.