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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

#261

Post by dmoy »

shard wrote: post #54
dmoy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now I'd pay good money for corporate HVAC. I'm coughing myself to death in my own home right now

If this is because of high PM2.5 concentration (due to wildfires or otherwise), I suggest building a DIY air filter, such as the one in the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU When the Air Quality Index shot up to ~150 in my area (you want to keep it below 100, preferably below 50), I went to Home Depot and bought box fans and furnace filters and built my own. You can check the air quality in your…

Thanks I do have a fairly good filter for one room in the house, where I'm holed up. Just when I have to venture out for food and stuff, I either wear a mask in the house or just cough.

The AQI in my area is closer to 300 :(

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

#262

Post by mjfl »

djmips wrote: post #213
mjfl wrote: post #17

As a young guy who was a full time remote worker for about 6 months, and also very honest with myself: I was more distracted as a remote employee. I wasn't as focused as I needed to be and when I was on site working next to the guy I reported to I was much more productive.

That's true but you were fooling yourself. Wait until you get fired and then you'll realize it's about getting your work done and not where you are sitting. Discipline should come from within.

> That's true but you were fooling yourself.

When did I fool myself? What are you talking about?

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

#263

Post by nsriv »

zepto wrote: post #258
nsriv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right in that most office workers take Monday to get going and wind down on Friday, but Jamie Dimon is the guy that lied in Congressional testimony multiple times, so that's equally likely.

It’s not equally likely unless you think 50% of statements Dimon makes are lies. If you do think that, it would be an interesting and unusual claim worthy of analysis, but it’s certainly not a reasonable assumption without such analysis.

I think he's not a dispassionate observer of WFH trends. Lies have an underlying motive, and he's shown before that he is willing to lie in high-stakes testimony to avoid a negative outcome. Dimon's WFH assertion was made to analysts, and in his role as a leader at JPMorgan, presumably for a positive motive (market sentiment, boost morale, ensure a return to normalcy). This wasn't an off-the-cuff observation. By equally likely I mean he was in a situation with a clear motivation so the likelihoods are between truth and falsehood. In that frame, 50% is generous.

Edit: the above does preclude the idea that "truth" can have a motive behind it as well, but I don't particularly think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

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

#264

Post by hnarn »

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 would argue that measuring productivity is only possible if you’re trying to detect the lack of it. Ie it’s definitely possible to see if someone’s slacking behind the rest if whatever output they’re expected to create is way less than the average of all colleagues, but at some point you have to accept that the confidence intervals are pretty vague.

In a situation where workload is at least sort of randomly distributed, which it normally is given time, there’s no other good explanation for statistical deviancy than simply less “work” being done.

But again, this only works for detecting problems. As you point out, and I agree with you, as soon as you attempt to measure “change in productivity” you’re on very thin ice.

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

#265

Post by seventhtiger »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #190
cryptonector wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This sounds true and I've seen it in action. But I always wonder about the implications.

Must we keep our most important measures target free? That sounds insane, although I can see how it would improve the measurement.

So the questions is how are we supposed to set targets without our most important measures?

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

#266

Post by chiefalchemist »

zepto wrote: post #259
chiefalchemist wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was simply noting that one person's lie is another person's "motivating speech." I was also noting that not being 100% transparent typically gets called deception or propaganda. Mr D singled out the younger employees but he was also careful not to say it was them and only them. Calling out everyone would be a bad move for moral. So he sliced his "facts" a bit in order to meet his ends. That's deception, and not fra…

Except it’s not really deception - it’s just a true statement. It’s only ‘throwing younger people under the bus’ if you use it to support a pre-existing narrative that he isn’t actually making.

We don't know if it true. We have to trust him. And that's not wise given his track record.

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

#267

Post by golergka »

gotaran wrote: post #135
golergka wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> living in a cramped space with 3 roommates in SF with no privacy > About $450k all in What.

Haha, well it's the same spot I was living in when I was making $120k + non-liquid RSUs. And since it was rent controlled, I never bothered to move. I'd be paying $3000 more if were to move into a 1BR, and I would rather spend that on travel, dates, and post-tax investments. And anyway, an apartment that's fairly spacious can turn into a congested mess when everyone's WFH. Previously, all of us had tech jobs where we…

Just curious, what's your career path? Growing your compensation 4 times in such a short timespan does sound like an achievement, at least from outside the valley.

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

#268

Post by jessaustin »

ponker wrote: post #214
yhoneycomb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent does not agree, if parent agreed, then parent would not have used the word "abuse", which implies that the worker is the one at fault. There are many nuances to the English language that are difficult for non-native speakers to pick up.

Is there a word for the pedantry of an uninformed idiot?

I nominate parent: "honeycombing".

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

#269

Post by kortilla »

wsatb wrote: post #118
kortilla wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

You’re ignorant either way. The only difference is whether or not you seem informed to your stuck up friends who read a particular news source every day. Do you realize how big the world is and how irrelevant the vast majority of “major national news” is to actual life?

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

#270

Post by kortilla »

tsimionescu wrote: post #207
r29vzg2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unless you’re in a position to actually create change, I don’t see how following every single update to an unfolding news story helps you. I am not talking about being completely ignorant. There is a saying, important news will always find you. You could…

Avoiding the news is a good recipe for becoming ignorant, and only knowing the propaganda. In a world of public relations experts, the only way to avoid this is to look for original sources that you can trust (e.g. by interacting with people who were part of the event), and/or listen to as many different news sources as you can find. You should usually avoid the bigger ones, especially the ones intended for mass cons…

Following the news is a good way to drink a bunch of propaganda and think you’re not ignorant when you still are. See Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
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