[pavel_lishin]

I definitely agree with you about (1), though this can be somewhat mitigated by having a good culture of agreeing to hop into impromptu video calls.

(2) feels weird to me; if the work is getting done, is there an issue? Does it matter if I spend 4 hours or 2 hours on a design doc, if the result is a good design doc?

[dreis_sw]

(2) At the office, it's harder to pretend that work took longer than it actually took. If you're done with the design doc in 2h, with colleagues sitting all around you, what can you do to pretend that it took you longer? Mess around with Confluence, pretending to work? You might as well move on to the next design doc, or find something useful to do meanwhile.

At home, you can just pick up the Xbox controller and say it took you 4 hours.

I like the comfort of WFH, and there are plenty of people (myself included) that are responsible enough to handle it, but the problem is that the average person isn't. And we all pay for it.

[munksbeer]

> And we all pay for it.

That's a very confident statement to make. My company is very much happy with remote working. 50% of my team aren't even in the country. Most other teams are the same. I don't feel like I'm paying any price for that.

[dreis_sw]

Happy to hear that it's working out well for you, but there is always a cost. The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry, the more companies like yours stand out. And remote work goes back to being a premium, highly competitive perk, like it used to be in the past.

And I agree that remote work is perfectly possible with a good culture and responsible employees, but most companies don't really have the culture or hiring practices that optimize for that.

[munksbeer]

> The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry

You're presupposing your conclusion. I don't believe remote work is less successful. I think this is driven from angles such as:

* Managers who have made their career by visibility, struggling to adapt to a new normal

* A way to get rid of staff without paying severance

* Pressure from certain types of politician who have made up their mind (regardless of any evidence) that remote working is harmful

And others

It really is a shame that for once it felt like labour had something going their way, and somehow the leaders of capital have convinced us to fight each other on this, while they take it away again.

[SauciestGNU]

Have you not noticed management cracking the whip in this environment? 2 hours shopping could be 2 hours shipping code! Everyone has uniform maximum productivity every minute and anything short of 100% focus on work is time theft!