Returning to the office is counter-productive

If CEOs had to work on a open office floor like everyone else, they'd want to work from home too

As a person who suffers from ADHD (diagnosed), I’ve long understood the benefits of working from home. From my very first startup job in 2008, I worked from home at every opportunity I could. I worked from home so consistently that it usually necessitated my having a dedicated office which meant an extra bedroom which in San Francisco meant a lot of extra rent, which could fortunately be written off.

As an engineer, the benefits were numerous and directly benefit the company I worked for. First of all, without all the noisy distraction of the office, I would quickly get into the Zone and stay there for very long periods, hammering out code and solving complex problems with ease. My overall productivity at home vs the office was easily 200-300%. Additionally, since I was so comfortable in my home office, I’d usually work longer hours since I wouldn’t notice or care exactly what time it was or be dying to leave. And most important of all, I had my home computer setup. Companies have started to recognize that multiple monitors help some with productivity so the best I have ever gotten is two 27” screens, but at home I have three 32” monitors and my favorite keyboard and mouse. For a senior engineer / CTO, this makes a huge difference in my productivity. Additionally, I’m using my desktop. And of course, this is no normal desktop. At home company, on my Lenovo P52, the test suite I ran multiple times a day took 18 minutes. On my home workstation, it took 6 minutes. This additional time not waiting around not only adds up to more time spent coding, but more time spend in the Zone since you’re not broken out of it.

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Sibble & Associates provide technical due diligence services to VC firms as well as angel investors and offers the ability to build prototypes, MVP's, and provide fractional CTO services to startups, all under one roof, ensuring that our clients have the ability to bring their technical concepts to fruition.

However, before Covid, getting permission to work from home was always a challenge, despite being so ridiculously more productive. Every company I worked for wanted my ass in a chair in some dimly lit, loud, cramped open office dungeon that made me both want to leave the moment I arrived and prevent me from ever reaching my productivity capabilities. You could see across the eyes of all the other engineers how much they hated being corralled into tiny areas filled to the brim with desks with dozens of power strips plugged into each other one after the next like some fire marshal’s nightmare. How more breakers never tripped I’ll never know (some frequently did).

These were the highest paid employees at most of these companies treated like their workspace was less than an afterthought. It was my life for 10 years. Go to any startup’s office and you’ll see the same thing. Some were worse than others giving you so little personal space you’d literally be bumping into the person sitting next to or behind you all day. And you’re expected to perform at your best as someone who has 20+ years of coding experience and feel respected and valued being provided such a terrible work environment. As I always say, actions speak louder than words and the work environments I was given told me exactly how much my employers actually cared about me, which was apparently absolutely not at all.

To say it killed morale would be a gross understatement.

At my companies, we took a vastly different approach and will always and forever be remote, but that’s beside the point.

So of course Covid was welcome from the point of view that it would usher in a work from home revolution not just for me but for everyone. WFH has allowed people to spend more time with their families and children, take more autonomy in their personal lives (one of the three most important motivators for an employee according to Daniel Pink..see video below), and at the same time be more productive than at the office according to almost every study. Now, the problem is not everyone is as disciplined as I am. A small minority take advantage of the situation and do some nefarious activities when they should be working. Now, how exactly to define work vs. personal time has been very gray since the WFH shift started of course. Personally, I’ve always been of the believe that if you get your work done on time and satisfactory, who cares when and how it’s completed? However, a lot of companies don’t see it that way.

So let’s discuss why, especially now that so many companies, some rather brazenly are pushing hard for workers, even those promised permanent remote jobs, to come back into the office.

See, I had to fight at each employer for almost every day to be able to work from home despite having direct metrics I could point to demonstrating how much more productive I was. I could show them the data. And they still wouldn’t let me. Or if they would, it’d be 1-2 days a week. They were willing to sacrifice all of that extra productivity just to see me sit in a chair in their cramped office doing less work.

This doesn’t just extend to employers though. I’ve experienced it at home in my previous marriage. As an engineer, I can work from anywhere I have my laptop. So I frequently skip my desktop setup for a comfy spot on the couch in the living room or even lying in the bedroom when the sunlight was streaming in. And many times, my ex-wife would come and ask me, “Why aren’t you working?” I would point to the code on my screen and explain that I was. She still wouldn’t get it and bizarrely suggest I “get back to work in your office.”

It just generally seems there are a lot of people who cannot wrap their heads around if they don’t see someone working the way they think they should be working, then they must not be working. Such is the case with so many managers (usually CEOs) that I had. Some were indeed micromanagers, but they were in the minority. Most simply had this uncomfortable feeling that if they couldn’t see you working, then you weren’t. And in my case, they were willing to sacrifice all of the additional benefits of extra productivity just to be able to see me sitting at my desk. That’s pathologically insane from a person whose job is to push forward a company and who is bound by fiduciary duty.

Speaking of, there’s a good argument that CEOs forcing their employees back into the office are breaching fiduciary duty since, as mentioned and linked, studies have repeatedly shown productivity is higher when employees work from home. Maybe someone should look into a shareholder lawsuit or two?

In any case, this was just another reason I left the workforce and started my own company. Ironically, I’ll probably get an office for myself since I actually enjoy the separation of home and work. It was never about that. But I won’t be sharing it with anyone and it’ll be large enough to give me space to think and have a proper desktop computer setup. I will permanently refuse to ever go back to those pits of despair.

George Sibble
Managing Partner
Sibble & Associates

Side Note

Why have environmentalists not called out the environmental disaster that would be returning to the office? Work from home has been fantastic for removing car emissions from the atmosphere. Thousands of companies are now ordering millions of workers to commute five days a week twice a day and I have yet to see one article on how this is effectively an environmental disaster. If we’re serious about reducing emissions, anyone in support of reducing CO2 output should be in support of working from home policies and speaking out. Get to it or I will permanently label you all as hypocrites.