Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output
21 comments
·December 2, 2025jacquesm
Aurornis
I’m in a big peer group for managers where a lot of us are remote managers. (Let me repeat before the angry downvotes and comments: I am a remote manager and proponent of remote work)
This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time. The big companies who tracked a lot of metrics and followed employees from hire onward already knew that remote environments are harder for new people to thrive in. This is why a lot of the companies who did return to office still allow remote work, but they require new hires on-site first and to accumulate a track record of delivering within the company.
It’s also why a lot of full remote companies have gone back to hiring people who already have a lot of remote experience.
The period after COVID where companies hired anyone into remote roles and assumed it would work for everyone was not a good thing for remote work, IMO. A lot of people cannot handle remote work for different reasons: Many don’t communicate well. Some can’t focus at home. Some can’t cooperate with people via text, even though they’re fine in person. Some just want remote work to disappear into the background and respond to a couple emails or Slack messages from their phone while they’re on vacation all the time. It all added up to excessive problems for companies that threw in the towel for RTO.
I know this comment will anger remote maximalists who think everything and everyone should be remote, but we tried that and it didn’t work. I think we’ve overcorrected for now, but the future is probably going to settle into a norm where remote is a limited option for companies and candidates who can handle it, but not the norm for everyone.
candiddevmike
What is your definition of "new person" though? If someone has been remote for years, are they still a "new person"? If you trust them enough to hire them, why is there a need to keep earning trust for more privileges. This just seems like a carrot to squeeze some kind productivity or control out of people.
noobermin
The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
jacquesm
The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.
delichon
I thought that the title drops the lede somewhat, so my version paraphrases the second sentence of the abstract:
We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output.hyperpape
> Capital is something you expend
Or hoard
robinhouston
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.
bluedino
> 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.
Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
mdrzn
(2023) and still waiting for a resubmit and review.
Why is this here in the first page?
ilc
To Quote the Page:
Notes Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
I'd wait for the revision.
Clent
It's quite telling that this is nothing more than an abstract but it has gained votes so fast it hit the top link.
delichon
The abstract page has a link to the whole paper as a PDF:
https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
b00ty4breakfast
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"
afavour
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.
talkingtab
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?
candiddevmike
Open floor plan hotel seating with 1' distance between you and the next person who eats raw onions at their desk while talking to their spouse constantly
throw10920
It's probably pretty close to the Allen Curve.
micromacrofoot
It's in the study, generally it's sitting close enough to converse
they didn't study alternatives to proximity, which isn't surprising because I'm not away of anyone that regularly works with a constant audio or video stream active?
dickiedyce
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.
jmyeet
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...
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...