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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

#241

Post by tilolebo »

thirtyseven wrote: post #111
Retric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> what makes you think they magically will develop one now?

Nothing magical here, the culture shift will/should happen exactly because remote work is now the default.

The same way companies adopted Internet and digitized their workflows.

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

#242

Post by imtringued »

Aunche wrote: post #157
andreilys wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines of code on average is a terrible measure of productivity. I’ve solved problems with 6 lines of code that took me a week to think of. Other days I write 600 lines of code. I would argue that the former 6 lines I wrote is much more productive than the 600 lines.

For an individual, lines of code is a bad measure. Some problems are harder than other and some people do more design or leadership work. However, for the collective this all should average out.

The top comment started off with the argument that you can't know the relative importance of the work. 6 lines of code can do a lot. 600 lines of code can do little. To measure productivity you have to measure how difficult the job is compare how valuable the job is. Most of the time both value and difficulty are unknown.

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

#243

Post by rubidium »

andreilys wrote: post #159
rubidium wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fresh grads: x2 Manager checkins daily for first 2 months For the 2-5 yr expirence: x1 checkin daily for the first month For the 5+ yr experience engineer: x1 checkin daily first week. For all: reduce checkins as appropriate for each, case-by-case.

2x Daily Checkin’s for 2 months.... sounds like a recipe for micro management. Also given most managers schedules are packed, I’m not sure how feasible this advice is. Especially if they onboard 2 or 3 new hires.

This is fresh college grads, and it’s literally a “you have things to do? Are you stuck at all?” The checkins reduce in proportion to the positive check on things.

People don’t understand the massive amount of time new hires can spend stuck (be it HR, software license issues, unfamiliarity with the process, etc).

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

stevesimmons wrote: post #230
HenryBemis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 US…

You are conflating very different issues. So yes, it does come across as a rant. My perspective, as someone who worked for JPMorgan in technology for 8 years, and for several other banks, is that JPMorgan is way above most other banks in the quality of their systems and their dev teams. Likewise the top management. Jamie Dimon is very impressive. You don't get to stay CEO of a bank with 250,000 employees for more tha…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by brmgb »

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…

So you actually believe that if we imagine two plumbers A and B doing exactly the same jobs at exactly the same speed, A charging 70$ an hour and B 35$, A is twice as productive as B ?

It's in line with GDP based reasoning but that's generally done on aggregated data which tend to smooth out these kinds of oddities. As a direct comparaison, it is probably at odd with what most people envision when they think of productivity.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

gotaran wrote: post #97
an_opabinia wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about moving back home? Your parents will be happy to have you around, cooking will be fun again, they are your best friends. And since there are only 7 zipcodes in the whole US where single men outnumber single women ages 20-40, your dating life may surprisingly improve too! Listen this is a healthy perspective. Having such clarity about how shitty things are without the perks. Most people sit around years rumin…

Thanks, that's actually great advice. I can't move back home - my parents aren't in the US and with border closures and tax implications I don't want to risk international travel now. I don't have any visa issues thankfully, so I can pretty much relocate to anywhere in the country. I'm thinking of an AirBnb in a nice seaside town.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by user5994461 »

conductr wrote: post #150

Something I’ve observed is middle management is doing more of the doing. That is to say, they are cutting out their (younger) subordinates. This is happening as they want to be in the best position to survive layoffs. I sadly have overseen the talent reviews aka lay-off rankings and I’ve heard from colleagues that this is happening at their companies too.

This.

Interns and new graduates are mostly dead weight right now. They're impossible to train and bring up to speed without being physically together.

Layoffs will come and younger employees will be the first to go.

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

#248

Post by klmadfejno »

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…

Whichever one earns more dollars is more productive in terms of dollars. If you want to do this right, pick a good metric (plumber dollars is fine), then optimize your workforce for that metric. Do not reward them for that metric or it will be gamed. Consider other metrics that are important (e.g. customer satisfaction) and set constraints on the processes that set a standard that must be met.

Not objective, not right 100% of the time, but let's not pretend its impossible to improve processes with some sort of goal in mind.

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

#249

Post by klmadfejno »

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…

I don't agree that measuring productivity is impossible. It's obviously possible for some roles, especially sales, which seems to be the focus here. That said, it's dubious whether or not they've got anything real here. They say productivity fell, especially on monday and friday. Probably implies they're looking at:

* Login time on the VPN

* Number of meetings or some other proxy for activity

* Sales numbers

The first one might be right. People might be spending less time working, when working remotely. The mistake is in assuming that they would be contributing any sort of value if they were in the office and logged in 100% of the time.

The second one might be right too, but again, may not correspond to anything

The third one, if true, probably has less to do with the productivity of the workers and more to do with the economic situation.

But who knows? They may have something real.

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

#250

Post by bob33212 »

1e-9 wrote: post #218
Robin_Message wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then, what if one salesperson builds up better longer term relationships (e.g. by not pushing options the customer doesn't really need) and thus their future sales will be better but their initial productivity looks poor? Or a team player who is good at opening conversations but not closing? (I know, always be closing) But yes, with a quantifiable and accurate and business-orientated metric, you can measure some…

Modifying a now trite-but-true saying from the statistical modeling world: “All productivity metrics are wrong, but some are useful.” I imagine there will always be an infinite number of ways an employee could add value that would be inadequately reflected in any finite collection of metrics, but that does not eliminate the usefulness of good metrics. Managerial judgement is always needed to account for exceptions th…

Metrics will never be perfect, they are an approximation of the real world. And some things are unknowable. Maybe a customer goes bankrupt 3 months into a project and you never collect the full revenue. One metric shows that a salesperson closed that deal and another metric shows that his revenue per customer isn't good.
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