If you have the choice, do you prefer working from home or from your office? And why?

@axelisys @ethar_alali Looks like it's really nice to work in your company 😍. I do prefer working from home. I am more productive, and I can get done a LOT more than at the office. Mostly because at the office, I keep being distracted by the environment around me to which I am really sensitive.

@sansa We have generally found productivity increases by 35% on average. Which is about in-line with studies around home-working. Some people find working from home difficult because of the isolation, but overall everyone seems happy enough. It also ensures people don't have to choose between their kids and their work, or caring for elderly parents, or whatever else. It's always been a false dichotomy. However, industry itself was taught it 200 years ago and pushed it on every generation since. I hope @axelisys is proof it doesn't have to be that way!

@sansa @axelisys @ethar_alali Very interesting thanks for sharing! I guess I'm part of a minority but I totally understand your POV. For me, COVID-19 and forced remote working made me realise I actually love my work environment and I feel more useful among my coworkers.

@sansa @axelisys @romaincauchy Trust me, IME of having done this for so long, everyone at best, criticises and at worst, hates, the idea until they actually do it with an appropriate, meritocratic framework for pay and consideration. The lightbulb moment comes, and you can see it in their faces. But for many who are used to working in an office, this comes with two other emotions. - Anxiety that they will do something wrong. This is tied into something akin to impostor syndrome. However, the rule is simple. Do the ticket, get paid. We have almost no other rules apart from those that run the dev process. - Guilt that they are getting paid lots to do what feels like easy work. This comes from the loss of the cognitive load of form filling and monitoring. If anyone feels like a day off, just take one. I don't care. Being selfish, and slightly facetious, it takes time out of my day to care :-D I've been talking about remote work for 17 years. Indeed, I basically "stopped" talking about it in around 2010, because there was a huge backlash from various people (some with vested interests, but most without). The classical thinking was "At home, you can't separate work and life and we need a work life balance" yet the methods advocated, competed for a precious resource (time) and that creates stressors around it. Any such competition for a precious resource, also creates unnecessary management overhead, for a much worse ultimate outcome. In corporates, this will often mean a new VPN, HR forms, absence/sickness, holiday pay... every one of those extra overheads JUST to work from home, which you then have to store somewhere and access at particular times, your boss has to find someone to cover etc. In general, every day off you want to take, required 4 person-days of paperwork and management. Our method, it's natural. For example, if you worked for someone and could only get a doctor's appointment for 11am, then you have have to tell your boss, perhaps fill out a form, then have a meeting with your boss when you got back in, and your boss has to take time out of their day to check up on you and also check you were not pulling a sicky and report that in an HR form etc etc etc etc. With our method (work when, how and where you like) there isn't a competition. You live your life and work around your commitments. We don't have junior or senior splits in the company, everyone gets paid the same per column-ticket. So sometimes classical "juniors" can be better than "seniors" and that method is automatically rewarded. There is ZERO extra management, because that is our default position. The trouble is, it's taken a global pandemic to show people the better side. Even worse for us, we can't get a break! :-D Most media and web outlets focused on companies who've had to change in response to the pandemic not ones who've been doing this since forever [and in doing so, those outlets risk promoting bad practises or ones we've seen not work nearly a decade ago]. Many companies who have absolutely zero experience running such firms are now branding themselves as experts even though they didn't know what this was at the start of the year. This stores up a host problems for later on. Sure, with a potential backlash but also because the methods advocated by them, can, and do, lead to WORSE productivity overall. Anyway, I'm ranting again :-D

@sansa @axelisys @romaincauchy @ethar_alali Absolutely agree. I love your point about the relative "novelty" of the work/home separation in the historical context. Before the first industrial revolution, people did mostly work where they lived. Now, with an exponential increase in tech common accessibility and reliability, we can finally bring this beautiful experience back to life. Just a small tip from personal experience: even if you don't have daily video calls, don't forget to wear something just a bit more restrictive than your pajamas :D This might sound obvious to some and insignificant to others, but I do notice a slight performance decrease when I occasionally forget to change to my "home-office outfit".

@new_user_2896ad1e65 Thanks for sharing. Here we can choose to work from home 2 days a week. I personnaly never work from home but I could reconsider!

@naureenanwar What you describe about social/working interactions is precisely what I have in mind, and what I fear I'd miss in a full-remote job. Where I work, we can have 2 days a week at home and it seems like a good compromise indeed.