Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)

From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_:

> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

> Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.

From personal experience after working 4 years remotely, I started going to the office three days a week, and while efficiency per day is definitely smaller, we achieve much better results much faster, just because we can solve a lot of problems just where we are, without scheduling meetings or waiting for people to answer. Not to mention how much more I personally learn from my colleagues.

Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].

If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.

A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.

[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)

I feel that my highest productivity was the 4 years I spent on the same team working remotely but having many interactions per day with my coworkers and manager. I only physically was in-person with my team for 1 week during that 4 year span. But every day I was working WITH my teammates, interactively. My manager was open and honest about things and the company culture embraced discussing "What if we did X?" to debate how we could improve things and dream up new ideas.

Prior to that I worked in-person in offices doing similar types of engineering. I was never as productive there but I did see more sides of the business and I got to do more varied tasks. Having lunch or going for a short walk physically with teammates and non-teammates definitely spawns opportunities which otherwise don't naturally happen.

Now, I do consulting/contracting remotely. Often I'm working on weeks to months long contracts. All my customers are remote. It's very clear that my value is in short term results, to get the customer past their current problem. If any planning for the future is found, I recommend it, but unless the customer wants me to pursue it then the recommendation is all I give.

All 3 kinds of work have pros and cons. I do miss regularly having lunch with coworkers. I MUCH prefer my remote work commute, flexibility, and work/life balance.

One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter.

[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday

Precisely why we do:

* No Mail Mondays. Engineers are deep in the code and are not disturbed other than the on-call. Engineers are expected to have a stack of work they can make the progress on if they get stuck. These days are in-office.

* Work from Home Wed: Coordinated work from home day. This forces everyone to be available online, and nobody is missing in-person meetings. Response times expected to be quick in slack.

While not perfect, and we do have some employees that struggle with output on WFH days, this is far more productive than 5 straight days in office.

Cue lots of managers using this title to push the 'back to the office' movement a bit further.

There are so many axis other than 'output', and some of them are a lot more important. For instance 'quality'. And 'employee happiness' and 'employee retention'. The term 'human capital' is such a terrible one to use as an abstraction. Capital is something you expend, once you start looking at people as just another resource to make ROI on you're asking to be treated the same way in reverse.

@Dang: suggested title change: "The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?"

full text:

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...

> These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over forty who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office.

Too bad the former is the least likely to be hired thanks to "AI", and the latter the most likely to be laid off cause of ageism that says "You cant teach an old dog new tricks"

During COVID, studies supporting working from home leading to higher productivity were highlighted. Now when companies want people to come back, studies supporting working in an office producing higher productivity are highlighted. Funny how that works and this post is already 100+ points.

*cant wait to see those down votes for this comment

Currently sitting in an open office floor plan surrounded by 4 other developers less than 3 feet away speaking in Hindi. I don't speak Hindi. There are constraints to this open door distraction.

If an alien was reading many of the comments here, before they knew much about the world, they’d probably first believe that working from office is this new fangled idea that had never existed before.

Once they were shocked to learn that until 2019 office work was the norm, they’d probably expect to see massive improvements in employee health, satisfaction, productivity, reduced commuter miles, reduced emissions, children with better mental health, children doing better in school, etc.

Imagine their shock when they find that none of those are true, and in fact, some of those metrics have actually gone the other way.

This isn’t to suggest remote work cannot be helpful. Maybe things would have been far worse otherwise. But (a) it’s very hard to see in the data, and (b) remote work proponents need to stop sounding like the world disnt exist before 2020 and/or as if everyone was just miserable and life was basically impossible at the time.

Makes sense. I consider myself very lucky to have become a senior engineer before COVID. As much as I appreciate WFH flexibility (especially as a parent) I do worry that the next generation of engineers don't have anywhere near the same level of mentorship. I get a lot of mileage out of video conference pairing tools but it's still not the same as sitting together. But I guess I probably am more efficient in the short term when I don't spend so much time on mentorship...

All that said, I still prefer where we are compared to where we were.

(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review.

Why is this here in the first page?

This all vibes with what I observed during the pandemic myself, also in a Fortune 500 SV enterprise:

* Working together in close proximity resulted in higher distractions that lowered output, but made it easier to identify meaningful priorities beyond what was on the Sprint Board and jump in to help when necessary. This extended to mentoring Juniors as well, who thrived on proximity-based work to a significant degree.

* Working apart allowed us to work at our individual best, with the consequence of a loss of cohesion. This was mitigated through daily standup ceremonies as a way of checking-in and asking for help, and I credit a string of three excellent people managers for building that functional working relationship between colleagues who didn’t share timezones or continents. This was frustrating for Juniors to adapt to (especially new hires), but at the same time the independent working mode forced them to figure stuff out on their own, learn to ask for help when they needed it, and build confidence in their own skills.

* The best balance involved hybrid/remote work models with a yearly (ideally quarterly or semi-annually), week-long “crunch week” of sorts. The global team got together in-person for a week, did some off-site activities first (offroading, volunteering, sight-seeing) to build rapport, then we spent a week in a conference room together banging out eighteen months(!) of bigger project timelines, planning, and triaging in-person issues with other teams (like PKI changes). This was always followed on with nightly dinners where we dropped work entirely and focused on human connection, especially with Juniors who lacked self-confidence still and needed to be shown that work isn’t what defines existence.

My ultimate takeaway is that it’s all about balancing the three for optimal outcomes: letting folks knuckle down at home or privately when they need to focus, building in-person collaboration around intention rather than spontaneity of presence, and ensuring global teams meet together regularly (in-person and over video conferencing) to build rapport.

1 company? 2 buildings? Over < 5 years? Any evidence for "dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run" must be pretty sketchy.

To Quote the Page:

Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics

I'd wait for the revision.

So, when are we forbidding teams to have members in different offices?

I must have also missed the email telling everything about the re-org so that teams will only need to work with other teams in their proximity

how convenient for Meta.

And, as ilc (dunno how to link to other hn users, sorry) has pointed out, this has been notated "revise and resubmit"

The question is what do you mean by proximity? Is this only physical proximity?And does it mean that if you isolate people, but they are within 10 feet of each other they are more productive? And do the results change when there is not physical proximity, but substitutes or alternatives?

This is fascinating, and possibly relevant to companies that hire for the long term. Unfortunately, that excludes most of corporate America.

This work would suggest that the WFH movement would see a rise in sr. engineer salaries and a reduction in jr. engineers salaries, which we haven't seen.

What about all the time spent commuting? For all the drawbacks of working remotely, the amount of time/energy saved not commuting has to be the most significant. I get more 'focus time' where I can deeply concentrate when I work from home. If I have a commute, I feel frazzled and drained by the time I even step foot in the office.

It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility.

And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).

Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.

Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.

[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

Huh. Well, what's the average tenure at a company now?

Bureau of Labor Stats says: As of January 2024, the median tenure for all U.S. wage-and-salary workers was 3.9 years.

So that means we should all be working remotely, if productivity was the actual thing the capital & management classes were trying to solve.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current...

That's great for whoever wants this to justify their fearful, uninspired, fashion-driven back to office policies, love that for them, I hope you get the company you deserve. I also hope all of your best people (read: most expensive) leave, because aren't these dumb decisions always done to prod people into leaving without paying out severance? See also: fiefdom-building by cowardly managers, "leaders" who hate their home life, etc.

I, however, will continue to never go back to an office and will continue to be productive far beyond what I can be in an office. Why is that? Because I'm a professional who is quite good at the work he does and is able to collaborate with people regardless of their location and lead successful projects and can adapt myself to others' working styles. Thanks, hold the babysitting, please.

I will say this: as a person with ADHD, I, personally, am more productive in the office than I am at home. When I was hybrid, I'd go to the local library to work. That also helped.

It's also worth noting that I don't have a family to take care of, and that there are still issues with working in the office, like the commute.

If I had a missus and kids, I might feel differently.