> I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends

Yep, people are different.

> are way more productive remotely

Is this measured, or they are feel more productive? (I think, answer is the same: there is full spectrum here and somebody is less productive but feels more productive and somebody is really more productive and, maybe, feels the same :-))

But my previous team (where I worked at the peak of COVID) was less productive for sure (I can compare release notes between product release and see as they are shrinking from release to release at COVID time!), though we have some team members who thought that they become more productive!.

Also, long time ago I worked in distributed team (St.Petersburg, Russia / Boston, USA / Santa Clara, USA) and we had twice-a-year week-long whole-team in-person meetings in Boston office (I was from St.Petersburg). These were two hyper-productive weeks, when we solved a lot of problems which accumulated between these meeting, fast and efficient. It was before video-conferencing, so all other meetings was phone-calls (only audio), but still.

I understand, that it is not statistics, it is anecdotal, but I'm very skeptical about broad claims that distributed / remote teams (!) can be as efficient (or even more) as local ones. Personal contributors — sure, all people are different, but whole teams — I'm in doubt. We are social animals, and all these video calls are still conversation with pixels, not people.

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realusername 4 days ago | parent [-]

Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days.

Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is to ping people.

So on my case it's the opposite, I'm a bit skeptical you can achieve the level of focus you have in a remote team in a standard open space, that would require some discipline that not everybody has.

Not to mention the abomination of the open space with no reserved desk so you aren't even guaranteed to sit close to your team, removing the only potential useful advantage of being on-site.

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blacklion 4 days ago | parent [-]

Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell.

Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office.

Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at any time is bad too. It is why I speak about cooler chat (when person already distracted), not any chat :-)

	▲	jdbernard 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture. I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.
	▲	realusername 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well sure I do agree but I've never seen a tech company which isn't working in an open space. The non open-space companies feel even more rare than the remote ones. So when you compare remote productivity, that's what you have to compare with.