One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.

I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day.

Then before bed I catch up with my wife for a couple hours and we watch something.

I'm in heaven. Introvert heaven.

Communal offices drain my life.

That does sound like introvert heaven. Your company doesn't hold you accountable to your hours? If I could put in a solid 4 hours of work I would get just as much done as I do in 8, and then have extra time for myself and not the mental anguish of trying and failing to focus that whole time.

(Although the pessimist in me just sees those of us who need the social interactions forced to WFH as managers notice the cost saving potential, while those who like the peace and quiet of WFH are forced to go to the office as managers notice the overall drop of productivity… but this is why you shouldn't listen to me for too long ;-))

So I’ve gone from having meetings all day, every day, to having half that amount.

When we do have meetings, I’m also able to attend without having to do as many context switches as before. I’m not having to leave my desk, put down my work and move somewhere else. I can work through the meeting without distracting anyone else.

I’d say my productivity is at least 2-3x what it was before this.

At the same time, I’ll also fully admit that this is entirely subjective to myself and everyone has different ways of working. I thrive with lots of simultaneous communication and parallel tasks, so having everyone talking in slack and email and meetings at once is my ideal situation because the information now actively makes it way to me, and my time spent having to wrangle things is very much reduced.

(Before this whole thing happened some of the teams I work with already had rules to the effect that if some people were going to be on a remote video link, everyone called in that way.)

ADDED: I suspect a lot of people on this board work for small companies with co-located teams in a single location. You get up to companies of even modest size and you end up with people spread over continents and, for many of us, the daily reality is coordinating and having discussions across those continents.

If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch, thats some good ole internet armchair analysis for ya.

Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho.

Yes and a sympton of mgmnt/people(s) with too much time on their hands...and excess time manifests differently for some under WFH. They can't command and control as easily under WFH so what do?

Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves solely around collaboration in an open plan office then it's not going to translate well to WFH at all. You simply can't have 3 non-tech people for every dev that all need to be kept in the loop and are continuously making decisions when you're not physically there to keep the conversation grounded. Every big business job I've had has tons of these people that go out of their way to keep everything from the devs until the very last moment because "they're too busy" (with the last huge chunk of pointless work their decisions generated that could have been prevented with a 20 second conversation instead of 18 hours of bikeshedding meetings).

And devs are as guilty of this as everyone else. Right now things like code reviews and unit tests are the shit hot trend. "Agile" and "scrum" and whatever else are also red hot. The combination of both means the "default" way to build software is to break everything down into chunks that take hours, and run all the trendy processes on that time scale. If you're breaking every 45 minutes to do a code review, you're going to lose a huge part of the benefit of WFH, whereas in a hotdesking office environment you probably weren't going to build much momentum anyway so it's a much smaller sacrifice. The reason people are losing so much productivity is because before they probably palmed those tasks off to their in-office days so the 1 or 2 WFH days a week were highly productive (at least I know mine were). With 5 WFH days a week that's not an option.

The way to run a dev team remote is to give people more autonomy and bigger chunks of work, and tear down communication channels. Start measuring in weeks or months, let the engineers make the decisions and use their judgement on when to loop someone into a conversation. Teams need to be smaller, with 2/3rds devs and roles like product owner and BA providing support, instead of running the show. These roles need to be domain experts with a thorough understanding of what the business requires and an understanding of how software can meet that need. They should be a fountain of knowledge for the devs to access at their own pace, not just mindless machines that shit out JIRA cards with too much boilerplate. And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset, and focus their tech capabilities more on the fundamentals (quality code that produces for the business), and less on setting up elaborate structures that require constant upkeep and communication within the team (huge test suites, elaborate cross-project CI/CD setups, ridiculous webpack configs, constant code reviews, endless NPM dependencies and convoluted patterns that restrict creativity and increase mental load).

If you want to be productive from home, you need to create an environment where you can just sit down for a few hours, get in the rythym, and produce quality software. If I think of any great software from the past, or the engineers that produced it, none of them were doing it in anything that looked remotely like the dev environments we have today. Shit, most of them did it from home, or from offices that were so cozy and personal they may as well have been home.

I think we've spent the last decade trying to distill software development down into some finely tuned machine that any old cog can drive, and counterintuitively, the further it goes the shittier the software becomes. When I flip through older books like Peopleware, it makes me cringe at how many of the lessons in there still aren't followed, and the amount of problems that were pointed out in the 80s and 90s that aren't only unresolved today, but have seen negative progress.

I see covid-19 as a chance to try something different. Most companies are going to continue to make the same mistakes, and mass WFH will never see adoption as long as they do. So you can pretty much put that dream to rest. But I'm going to be working from home a lot in the future, and try doing things another way for a change.

I've been trying to obtain more non-tech skills within various companies for years now, but I get nothing but more JIRA issues. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that the non-technical workers who deal with the business requirements, revenue, customer interaction, etc. do not want the tech folks to have any control over their domain.

What would they be needed for if we could do both the business functions and also write the code they depend on?

So what ends up happening is instead of having one designer that helps design the look and feel of the app, and sets the direction for the devs if they need help aligning their work to it; instead you have 3 or 4 designers that get pedantic about every pixel on the screen and insert themselves into every stage of development. It's not the designer's fault, there's basically nothing else they can do to fill out 40 hours a week.

This is the huge problem with overhiring, it's so easy to just generate more work to fill out your work week, and work begets more work (especially for the devs, who are usually the only ones actually 'producing' on the team, so work flows down to them). So what happens is as soon as your team goes above capacity in a certain area, it affects development. And once somebody is on the team, it's really hard to remove them from the team. That's just human nature. Which is why it's so important to grow a team slowly and naturally, measuring the effect on the team and gauging team member's opinions at each step of the process.

When I start a project I want to start it with 1-3 people, and do not just the high level planning, but establish roles within the team at a low level. What will we be delivering day to day and what is our capacity? Then once you've got that you can hire conservatively around that. The 'usual' way of forming a team within a big business is complete bullshit. You're making all the decisions up front and trying to read the tea leaves about what your project is going to look like in 6, 12 or 18 months.

The only good commutes are near empty roads with nice scenery while I enjoy morning coffee and listen to the news.

Many people had to get used to long commutes in terrible traffic after all.

Hopefully the answer is that we all just gravitate towards companies that prefer one culture over another.

A place where the CEO/csuite/salespeople can have meetings and others can really come and go as needed.

If I recall, WeWork was getting into this market/model whereas they'd sublease space for a smaller number of companies, sometimes even just one enterprise.