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What remote work does to engineering productivity

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Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#11

Post by vz8 »

Maybe I'm the outlier here, but with the pandemic came a significant cultural shift, reducing office politics, and it's been something of a productivity renaissance for my organization.

Communication has downshifted to a few mandatory team and all-staff gatherings, one on ones with direct reports, and that's about it. We handle things through email and Teams for urgent matters. Overall, management has been light touch, trust but verify, and staff are given flexibility to set "project hours" to avoid interruptions.

Frank communication about what works, what doesn't, and setting realistic agendas (from the meeting level up to the epic projects) has been very helpful.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#12

Post by jcun4128 »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #2

I started a new job during the pandemic, and the experience has been much worse than I expected. There’s no opportunity to ask simple questions without always worrying that I’m interrupting. Whereas in an office it’s easy to see who’s on the phone or focusing on something and simply ask someone else (or wait). There’s also no opportunity for the kind of work-related conversations that might happen over lunch where I’…

Does your chat service not have a status? It usually can indicate like "in a meeting, busy, etc..." I usually make sure at least that they're not presenting or have busy on.

There is one aspect that kind of sucks, how everything you post is public/persists, I'm the dunce boy oh well.

The positive though is future people that have the same problem can search in the app and see the solution.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#13

Post by ivanhoe »

Shank wrote: post #5

I think there's always some skepticism that should be expressed around wild articles like this. At a core level, remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to mirror remote work outside of the pandemic. It's one thing if you choose to work remotely and if your company willingly embraces remote work. It's an entirely different beast if your company is forced to transition to remote work while stay-at-home or…

Absolutely, working from home is only one possible form of the remote work, and probably the most boring one. Working from a park, or a caffe, or a local hub, or some hotel anywhere in the world are all much nicer options, but quite impossible these days.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#14

Post by sdesol »

> False Assumption #1: Geographic Location Doesn't Matter

I can't find it, but maybe somebody from Microsoft can, but they (Microsoft) actually found building distance made a difference in productivity. This was in a research paper that I read, but for the life of me, I can't find it. I should also add a disclaimer that, this research paper was done before remote work became more of a norm and we had less technical options.

> Night owl behavior is actually the exception, not the norm.

I'm currently not tracking hours that people work with my developer analytics solution, but I think if would be flawed to just take into consideration when a pull request is authored to gauge behaviour.

If you look at the pull request information for vscode (my goto project for good data points) at:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...

you can see that for some pull requests, there can still be quite a bit of work from when a Pull request is authored to when it get's merged.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#15

Post by cybwraith »

sokoloff wrote: post #9
Shank wrote: post #5

I think there's always some skepticism that should be expressed around wild articles like this. At a core level, remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to mirror remote work outside of the pandemic. It's one thing if you choose to work remotely and if your company willingly embraces remote work. It's an entirely different beast if your company is forced to transition to remote work while stay-at-home or…

It added some and also removed some of the possible distractions from remote work. Kids at home for schooling is an addition. Many of the fun activities being closed is a removal. There’s no bar or restaurant to get together with friends, no club/rec level sports to play, etc. I agree that there are a lot of confounding variables, but think many were pro-efficiency rather than all being detrimental.

> There’s no bar or restaurant to get together with friends, no club/rec level sports to play, etc.

Not having these kinds of things available for long periods of time can cause people who relied upon them for an outlet to become depressed, which almost always hurts productivity

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#16

Post by paranorman »

I switched jobs during the pandemic and my productivity has been incredible. I was doing great WFH in my last role but my current employer has much better support for this environment.

I won’t claim that any single tool is a miracle but I have found Clockwise combined with Google Calendar to make coordinating with others a breeze. The automatic status management in Slack when you’re in “focus time” or a meeting is great for signaling to others whether their question is better suited for a public channel over DMs.

For me at least, productivity when WFH comes from having a proper environment (noise cancelling headphones and an office are a life saver when your partner is watching the screaming toddler) and working in an organization that embraces distributed teams.

Edit: If you’re considering a switch to an org that does remote right, feel free to hit me up for a quick chat.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#17

Post by leoc »

Shank wrote: post #5

I think there's always some skepticism that should be expressed around wild articles like this. At a core level, remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to mirror remote work outside of the pandemic. It's one thing if you choose to work remotely and if your company willingly embraces remote work. It's an entirely different beast if your company is forced to transition to remote work while stay-at-home or…

Children not being in school is another major difference.

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#19

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

wikibob wrote: post #3
lemoncucumber wrote: post #2

I started a new job during the pandemic, and the experience has been much worse than I expected. There’s no opportunity to ask simple questions without always worrying that I’m interrupting. Whereas in an office it’s easy to see who’s on the phone or focusing on something and simply ask someone else (or wait). There’s also no opportunity for the kind of work-related conversations that might happen over lunch where I’…

Be the squeaky wheel. It is to your benefit. Drop the questions in a public channel. People who are confident about their skills are less worried about appearing to look dumb for not knowing something. Because you know you’re competent at your skills, so if you can’t figure out something, obviously it’s poorly documented. Therefore just ask loudly.

Completely agree. People want you to ask questions because, in a remote world, your visibility is via the real-time channels (Slack, Teams, etc).

Re: What remote work does to engineering productivity

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Shank wrote: post #5

I think there's always some skepticism that should be expressed around wild articles like this. At a core level, remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to mirror remote work outside of the pandemic. It's one thing if you choose to work remotely and if your company willingly embraces remote work. It's an entirely different beast if your company is forced to transition to remote work while stay-at-home or…

[deleted]
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