I think companies need to accommodate the differences in people here; either within one company or within the industry they need to split into "office friendly" and "remote friendly" groups.
I'm on the introvert side of things and I'm simply oversaturated with human interactions. I have to actively avoid being physically around other human beings just to keep my sanity. I recently managed to convince my boss to give me 2 WFH days a week and I saw both my productivity and happiness skyrocket within those days.
A lot depends on the type of project, I guess. Mine is such that I'm mostly collaborating with the customer side, which works in a different country. For me, 99% of events in the office are off-topic. Others in this thread seem to have close-knit team projects, so I'm not surprised they feel more productive in the office.
I'm sensitive to the fact that you're more productive in an environment that caters to being an introvert. But if an organization were to allow people to work from home who asked to, how would they maintain the same overall productivity between groups?
What if you want to work from home but your team believes there will be a productivity-reducing communication cost? How does the organization respond to this? Can it bifurcate the teams between remote only and office only? What happens if they identify consistent productivity differences?
My point is not that you're wrong, but that I think adopting remote work requires answers to very challenging questions for companies that do not settle on one culture or the other. And if they don't start with a remote culture, in my experience they'll never have it.
Yeah, I agree. Allowing WFH is not a trivial thing for a company. My impression is that many don't allow it out of risk aversion ("nobody got fired for not allowing people to work remotely"?).
As a tangent, I wonder a project with such "productivity-reducing communication cost" for (even partial) WFH looks like. Honest question, because so far I've never worked in one. I ask because the very idea of it goes against what I consider a properly organized programming project.
On the design meetings of the projects I worked in, I always pushed for figuring out appropriate architecture to minimize required communication between people. We decomposed the problems until we were able to identify isolated areas of the project and design interfaces between them, and then we coded them in isolation, with occasional exchanges for adjusting the design (interfaces, in particular) when things changed, like they always do.
Teams that work in office already have productivity deltas between employees. This isn't communism-people are paid different amounts, they don't all work 100% and get paid the same. You reward the high performers, like you'd do anyway. Regardless of if it's WFH or not.
I'm on the introvert side of things and I'm simply oversaturated with human interactions. I have to actively avoid being physically around other human beings just to keep my sanity. I recently managed to convince my boss to give me 2 WFH days a week and I saw both my productivity and happiness skyrocket within those days.
A lot depends on the type of project, I guess. Mine is such that I'm mostly collaborating with the customer side, which works in a different country. For me, 99% of events in the office are off-topic. Others in this thread seem to have close-knit team projects, so I'm not surprised they feel more productive in the office.