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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

#181

Post by cryptonector »

daxfohl wrote: post #71

I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue. I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office. Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wro…

At the same time JP Morgan wouldn't have done the WFH thing if the world hadn't been falling apart. But yes, when the sky is falling, most people get very anxious, and anxiety isn't good for productivity. For JP Morgan, getting people back into the office might simply cure the anxiety issue, if that's what the issue is, and paper it over, making it seem as though WFH was the problem. But for JP Morgan it probably won't really matter, because if productivity has been down, and going back to the office fixes it, that may be all they care about.

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

#182

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Finance is a great enabler and very important -critical even-, but there's no need to be rude about it.

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

#183

Post by aussieguy1234 »

Are bank employees that work on securities permitted to use common collaboration apps such as Slack? Or are they prevented from doing so to crack down on insider trading etc?

If they can't use common collaboration apps you in a remote setting you could see how this could impact their productivity.

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

#185

Post by HenryBemis »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #139
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You can, for example, absolutely measure to the dollar the productivity of a plumber and you can easily compare two different plumbers I'm curious about this idea. What if plumber A shows up, quickly fixes something using existing, on-site materials, and ends up charging much less (no parts + 'quick' labor), and then the plumbing breaks again in X months. What if plumber B shows up, takes more time and replaces a p…

Quality is the conformance to requirements. If you (the client) wanted a quick and cheap solution then A is for you. If you wanted a robust and you are willing to pay the premium to get the B, you're in luck!

Mega big banks in the USA suffer from tech debt A LOT. The number one reason for operation disruptions is software errors, and with a large difference to reasons 2-3-4.

An additional point could be that large USA banks have a higher (imho) ratio of sociopaths in their ranks. Perhaps the sociopaths lost the ability to whip their minions, and the minions started working under normal/human speeds 40h a week instead of 60-70h per week that is the typical expected work while under the influence of a sociopathic boss.

Also lets not forget that JP Morgan CEO is THIS guy: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2019/apr/11/jp-mor...

I think that, although imperfect metric, the bottom line will speak of performance. I take it that there are multiple criteria that affect the bottom line, but the management of JPM cannot be trusted, again, sorry for repeating, is not the most decent in the planet.

Edit: apologies for the rant-y beat down of the mega-big US banks, but yeah.. not sorry really.

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

#186

Post by alephu5 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #180
fyz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity in this case is fairly simple to calculate = Cost/Duration. You can factor in the time (presumably that’s paid for so you should have a real number) and cost of materials (On-site use historical or replacement cost) yourself. Your points holds more generally though, especially when there aren’t clear prices paid.

That isn't productivity, productivity is value/duration.

You're absolutely right, but in "Agile" teams this is exactly how they measure productivity: story points (cost)/sprint (duration)

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

#187

Post by alexbanks »

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…

And if you were going to believe a company's metrics on productivity, JP Morgan is almost certainly not the place to start.

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

#188

Post by alephu5 »

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…

It doesn't surprise me that your friend failed on this project but it isn't obvious a priori that measuring productivity is futile. But in my current job they're trying to create KPIs for us, so I've thought about this a bit and can certainly recognise the difficulty.

As an engineer in general how can you quantify the value of maintenance? On paper it's just a cost and it's impossible to know what would have happened without it.

The worst strategy is just to measure easy things like story points or number of tasks completed because it ruins the work culture. In those cases you're not going to take time to review pull requests carefully, advise colleagues, propose new projects or work on difficult tasks. It seems impossible to measure these, at least to me.

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

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> This immeasurability is inversely proportional to the tangible, real value created.

I don't think that's true at all. Certain kinds of value are more easily measured, sure, and if that's all you mean by tangibility, what you say is a rather trivial tautology, but there's times when the value is real and tangible and easily qualitatively described (e.g., reduced workload), but tricky to measure because to accurately measure the increase you'd have to measure against a set of hypotheticals (e.g., cost/performance using best alternative of continuing with the status quo ante or competing automation options, including alternative custom builds.) For certain types of value, this is irreducibly true for many of the same reasons intellectual work is well established to be difficult to estimate accurately (this actually converges to an identical reason when what you are doing is building automation to support intellectual work.)

And even when productivity is measurable, it's often not easily measured at the time of delivery ; where the problem is measuring hypotheticals but the only problematic hypothetical is performance with the software, it may take considerable real use before the actual value is clear.

But, it also can be unclear the value of any individual contribution even when the aggregate product value is clear. Telling the value of what the team delivered is different than trying to peel out the value Bob created.

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

#190

Post by andyjohnson0 »

cryptonector wrote: post #173
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…

At Sun we experienced a new metrics fad every other year. Once they tried to use bug report clearance rate, so a friend said "I'm going to code myself a minivan" at a meeting. That metric didn't last. You have to have a great deal of sympathy for the management of software-heavy companies. They've no idea how to manage software development. Nobody really knows how to. It sucks. Oh, well, I suppose there is a way: min…

Goodhart's Law in action: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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