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At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

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Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#111

Post by thirtyseven »

Retric wrote: post #101
rossdavidh wrote: post #81

First off, let me say that I have happily WFH for a few years now. I'm not opposed to it. It works for some people. However, this is likely a problem that will get worse, not better, over time. The early WFH experience was able to cruise on the office connections, cross-training, personal knowledge, team-building, etc. that had happened previously. The longer people are away from the office, the more that hard-to-qua…

Interesting, I find on boarding easier with WFH teams because so much of that informal stuff gets documented. Transcripts of troubleshooting text only (slack/IM/etc) meetings for example are a gold mine. It’s really the mix of WFH in mostly face to face offices that’s difficult.

It's great if that stuff gets documented, but if your team didn't already have a culture of writing good docs, what makes you think they magically will develop one now?

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#112

Post by xwdv »

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

Just because it cannot be measured to a high precision does not mean it can't be measured. People clearly have some sense of when they are and aren't productive.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#113

Post by pmontra »

gotaran wrote: post #58
haswell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might seem a little off topic, but you are well positioned to read "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. It's been discussed on HN many times, and when I recently read it, it felt like someone finally "got it". Like "yes, this is what I've believed, but now someone else is saying it!". Back on topic - I've been on both sides of this. I started working from home ~7 years ago when I took a job on the west coast, but opted to sta…

> - If possible (this is hard or impossible for some), set up a dedicated work space This is the real killer IMO. It's impossible to focus in a studio apartment. It's where I cook, eat, drink, sleep, Netflix, and now work.

Try to micro partition your space.

Have a desk to work and a table to have food, possibly facing different walls.

Sit on a couch to play videogames and on a (office) chair to work.

Don't play games or watch Netflix on the computer you use to work. Uninstall them.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#114

Post by oh-4-fucks-sake »

lindenksv85 wrote: post #77

I think it’s unfortunate that people are taking statistics (or anecdotes) from this period to support or not support WFH. At this point in time, it would be rather audacious for anyone to claim that productivity is more tied to the location of your desk than to the fact that people are working through the apocalypse, and some people are working through more than one “once in a lifetime” disaster. If productivity is d…

Chiming in here. I moved across the country to SoCal and returned to the company I left, (re)-starting in Sept. 2019 as full-time WFH. I worked 4-5 days in the office before the move.

I'm a good control here because I've worked for the same company:

1. In the office

2. WFH pre-Covid

3. WFH during-Covid

What's more, all of my favorite activities: golf, hiking, cooking--are largely unaffected by the pandemic. My income's been the same and the work activities have been roughly similar.

I felt relatively productive WFH pre-Covid but something has changed that's affected my productivity/motivation--and I can't put my finger on it. I think it's the general, subconscious, back-of-my-mind feeling that things are profoundly going to shit that's dragging me down. It's been a struggle now when it's not been before.

This is all purely anecdotal, but I think I'm a good case-in-point example of your position: that WFH is a convenient strawman to hand-wave away the effects of people living in the final pages of a Vonnegut novel.

I love WFH; I want to be productive; but I don't think that shoe-horning people back into offices (wearing a mask all day, nonetheless) is going to magically turn everyone back into creative, chipper good-time-charlies.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#115

Post by baron_harkonnen »

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem

I want to start off by saying that I don't completely disagree with you, but all of us should take a step back and realize how an absurd of a position this is for us to be in a society.

This immeasurability is inversely proportional to the tangible, real value created. You can, for example, absolutely measure to the dollar the productivity of a plumber and you can easily compare two different plumbers, and see if environmental factors improve or decrease their productivity.

If you own a factory making screws you can unquestionably measure the valued added and therefor productivity of each and every employee. If you have a farm and you hire seasonal laborers to help you harvest, again you can easily measure the exact productivity of each worker, determine if a hot day makes them less productive etc.

Software engineers are a step removed from this in part because the things we make are of questionable value (especially in the extremes). Front-end contract engineers certainly seem to have measurable productivity. If someone can build you a working store front in 40 hours, you can compare this to another one how can do a worse job in 100 hours at the same rate.

But as software products grow more complex and the actual value more vague, then software engineer productivity likewise gets harder and harder to measure. And I think a real question every engineer who has worked at a large company has asked, even if they work their asses off, is "do I really create any value?"

Software engineers, again, are still closer to the side that you can measure real productivity because in at least most cases software itself is important. When you move on to other "office workers", those who are really struggling now, that value again is very hard to measure and therefore so is productivity.

The question that we need to ask more often is, if productivity is so hard to measure, maybe it is possibly because we might not be creating as much value as we have largely tricked ourselves into believing we have.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#116

Post by rtlfe »

> Work output was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts.

How would they measure that? It seems basically impossible, and the article has no details.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#117

Post by 13rac1 »

Apples to Oranges. This is not Work From Home. This is Work From Home during a Pandemic during Natural Disasters. WFHPND is a bit long for an acronym though.

Productivity may, actually, fall for younger employees at home, but data from this year is not valid for a calculation vs prior years.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#118

Post by wsatb »

kortilla wrote: post #92
avolcano wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do…

> in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. > but if I was working in finance? No way. People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate…

> This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events.

This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse.

> Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world.

I took the comment as they are not interested in finance. Maybe they've worked in the field in the past and don't like it. They didn't "shit on" anything.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#119

Post by sk5t »

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

Great background info; it reminds me--albeit on a greater scale--of an earlier HN thread to the effect of "how hard could possibly be to show street names on maps at with globally correct-seeming detail at arbitrary zoom level," which does sound kind of simple, if you've never tried to do it for real, but which has frustrated many smart people for a long time.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#120

Post by Barrin92 »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #115
holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem I want to start off by saying that I don't completely disagree with you, but all of us should take a step back and realize how an absurd of a position this is for us to be in a society. This immeasurability is inversely proportional to the tangible, real value created. You can, for example, absolutely measure to the dollar the producti…

>The question that we need to ask more often is, if productivity is so hard to measure, maybe it is possibly because we might not be creating as much value as we have largely tricked ourselves into believing we have.

at a very low level productivity is hard to measure because it's tacit and implicit rather than explicit. The reason why we can measure the productivity of a business is because it responds to price signals and you can put a literal number on what they put out.

You can try running some sort of market scheme within your company but at some point the trade-offs are bad and it adds too much complexity and creates strange incentives.

For software in particular if anything the opposite of your assumption is likely true. It adds a lot of value without necessarily being able to put a price tag on it. It's pretty hard to measure what wikipedia or vim is worth in terms of productivity as long as they're not charging, but that doesn't mean it's not worth anything.

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