Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#61

Post by yoloyoloyoloa » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

geodel wrote: post #13

st8675309 wrote: post #2

Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. The result is pretty clear with over 10,000 participants in the study. >>Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank con…

> Surprised this post isn’t getting more comments. From article: "The company that provided data is one of the world’s largest IT services companies. They have over 150,000 employees who work with clients across the globe. Most work in the home country, a rapidly- developing Asian nation." This is about a half-assed Indian "IT Services" company. (From where I am. Need to specify lest I also be branded as racist white…

Great comment

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#62

Post by throwawayboise » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

throwasquirrel wrote: post #16

adflux wrote: post #6

I have been unfortunate enough to be "diagnosed" with ADHD at a young age. Oh how strange it is that a child can't concentrate with 25 of his peers hopping and chatting around him, let's medicate him as soon as possible! /rant off Well, a few years ago I rented an office space with a friend of mine, just the two of us in a very spacious (100m2), light and well-ventilated office. We received no phone calls, there were…

I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do…

Being unable to do things you should be doing might be ADHD, it might also be depression. Depressed people often live in clutter, piles of laundry, papers everywhere, because they cannot find the will to get and stay organized.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#63

Post by numbsafari » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #46

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed mixed in-office and WFH teams before the pandemic. There was a stark productivity drop every summer when kids were out on summer break. This includes parents with dedicated home offices who had been WFH for many years. The effect was so predictable that we planned for lower velocity during summer months. It was also common practice for WFH employees to spend more time in the office for more focus during sum…

Oddly enough in my locale, we plan for lower velocity during deer hunting season, and pretty much for the rest of the year after that, because people put off their vacations in case they get sick, and have to use up their vacation time at the end of the year.

My wife works for . Every December is this hilarious ritual of “when deferred projects contractually committed for the calendar year meets mandatory vacation time meets overtime caps”.

It is pandemonium.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#64

Post by acituan » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:00 AM UTC

stinkbomb wrote: post #27

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offere…

I don't buy it.

I mean I trust you got the numbers on whatever metrics you thought you've measured, but I don't buy that this is a well designed human experiment and your conclusions sufficiently exclude alternative explanations.

First systemic bias in your study is that instrumentation of only IC productivity; if IC productivity could exist in isolation, we wouldn't need managerial functions to begin with.

Alternative explanation; distributed work shifts some heavy lifting from the self-organization of ICs to managers actually doing successful multi-party coordination. Most managers suck, therefore they couldn't handle the true test of their function. But having exclusive access to $product-leads@ circle, they could shift blame.

To add more; if productivity was that significantly low for some folks for 6-9 months, and your managers couldn't steer it, that points to a general leadership problem than an IC problem.

Second problem is not having a logical continuity between your IC metrics and business metrics. Did 40% increase in PR rejection rate of half of your developers slowed down any of your business metrics by 20%? E.g release delays, post-release bug counts, decreased reliability etc. If not, then you weren't really measuring what you thought you were measuring.

Alternative explanation; the seat warming, busy work pressure is higher when at the office in the physical presence of peers, which blows up the metrics without meaningful output; WFH makes it much more easy to cut through bullshit work, bullshit meetings etc. Until you can prove that the business output suffered proportionally, metrics like "WFH devs were spending 15-30% more time in non-development tasks" is meaningless. I am not even talking about how hard of a problem it is to really measure "time on dev-task". Sometimes taking a walk in the park to think through a problem is a dev task.

To get a proper picture, you'd need to be able to reject the alternative hypotheses with a greater strength. I think you also need to seriously look into the manager metrics; e.g. how do devs rate them as being able to communicate external priorities and requirements successfully, how many of them think they are working on redundant or meaningless work, that their code complexity is slowing them down etc. Not only these organizational bugs are much more expensive than small-but-easy-to-measure stuff like PR rejection rates, it is also more likely to be in your blindspot because you only interact with managers.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#65

Post by reader_x » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

mikelward wrote: post #30

saas_sam wrote: post #10

I remember reading on a different post (can't find it) that productivity went up sharply at the beginning of the pandemic-induced WFH trend, but then subsided over time. The thinking was that people were on their toes early on for fear of being viewed as a slacker, but then once they adjusted to WFH they relaxed. Maybe someone else saw this study...

People were running on adrenaline at first. Then the fatigue of having kids at home and not having the usual ways to let off steam eventually hit.

I agree, there was the adrenaline at first.

Plus, pandemic made my work suddenly WFH on a project already underway, with coworkers I already knew, so we went into it with momentum, perhaps even greased by being suddenly free of meetings, brown bags, time taken forever birthday celebrations down the hall, etc.

Gradually, however, those projects finished and new began. Yet, those new projects lacked the momentum. The toll of zero socializing crept up.

Then, 8 months into pandemic, I started a new job at new company. Onboarding 100% remote. Have never met new coworkers in person. I definitely feel I’m flying blind, that coworkers don’t really understand what the others work on. But the corrosion is subtly happening at just about the speed of rust.

I miss the meetings, the brown bags, the casual chats in the hall, the conversation at lunch that make unexpected connections or spark ideas.

My takeaways: 1. WFH isn’t static; effect changes over time as projects turn over and new employees onboard. 2. The organizational effect of the difference between 100% vs. 75% WfH, as compared to 75% vs 50% WFH is NOT = 25%; some other logarithmic scale of corrosiveness is resulting as we move to higher % WFH. Personally, I think I’d be most productive at 50% WFH (2-3 days per week).

(PS-none of above relates to trying to WFH with kids; that’s just impossible and a completely different topic.)

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#66

Post by remoquete » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

acituan wrote: post #64

stinkbomb wrote: post #27

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offere…

I don't buy it. I mean I trust you got the numbers on whatever metrics you thought you've measured, but I don't buy that this is a well designed human experiment and your conclusions sufficiently exclude alternative explanations. First systemic bias in your study is that instrumentation of only IC productivity; if IC productivity could exist in isolation, we wouldn't need managerial functions to begin with. Alternati…

:mic-drop: This comment is pure gold.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#67

Post by pkolaczk » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 6:06 AM UTC

Comparing office work with a WFH situation when kids are at home is unfair - apples to oranges. If you were in the office, where would your kids be? Who would take care of them?

If you want a fair comparison, compare to a situation when you bring your kids to the office. But no one is doing that, right?

WFH works fine if your kids are where they are supposed to be normally: school, daycare, kindergarten, with nanny or with your spouse.

If they can't be taken care of for some reason (e.g. they are ill), you'd be forced to take a leave if you didn't have WFH possibility. So your productivity would be exactly 0. Now with WFH and kids at home maybe you'd not manage to get top productivity, but it would be still greater than 0. So overall it is a net win, even when taking kids into account.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#68

Post by idownvoted » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

stinkbomb wrote: post #27

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offere…

This matches my experience as well: Measurably reduced velocity, noticeably higher rates of rejected PRs and broken builds, and a palpable worsening of productivity and team happiness. The strangest part is that if you asked individual developers, they would insist that WFH made them more productive and increased their efficiency. Yet managers and the data universally agreed that the opposite was true. There’s someth…

I can echo this.

I fear a backlash coming for WFH based on data-points like these once politicians can safely backpedal on their social distancing stance. Had to work hard in the past to get from 1d WFH/week to 4d/w. Then, Covid turned this upside down and post-pandemic I might be back to square one

I think the core issue lies with alignment. Pre-Pandemic I structured my WFH in a way that non WFH-members aren't blocked/annoyed/disturbed/... by it. I knew I was the outlier and had to work extra to make it work for others.

This extra-work looks completely different when a whole corporation goes 100%-WFH and I assume most/no-one was prepared. It takes more than a headset and Zoom.

Whole-team productivity is laughable, but except management no one is even noticing it, because all other departments are equally slower.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#69

Post by osigurdson » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

stinkbomb wrote: post #27

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offere…

It is odd that no one attempted to improve the situation when the metrics started to decline for the WFH group. The only way I could see this happening if the metrics didn't have much correlation with actual results. Presumably this is a real business after all and actual results matter.

Personally I am a little skeptical however since everything sounds so contrived.

Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]

#70

Post by kqr » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:43 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

stinkbomb wrote: post #27

My company started doing a serious WFH 'experiment' about 18 months before COVID hit. The team I oversee consists of a dozen or so teams of about 40-50 developers each, with a manager that reports directly to me. I don't manage the devs directly, but deal with dev productivity and budgets for (amongst other things) staffing. So our N is not small, but not huge either. 50% of our devs - randomly selected - were offere…

This matches my experience as well: Measurably reduced velocity, noticeably higher rates of rejected PRs and broken builds, and a palpable worsening of productivity and team happiness. The strangest part is that if you asked individual developers, they would insist that WFH made them more productive and increased their efficiency. Yet managers and the data universally agreed that the opposite was true. There’s someth…

This comment thread is one of the most interesting I've read in a long time.

My prior bias leans toward thinking WFH is not so bad for productivity, but I think you raise a really important point that I agree with:

Developers tend to focus on individual productivity at the expense of organisational productivity.

The latter is what actually matters, and that could very well necessitate slower individual pace, more checkins with other teams, project leads changing their mind more frequently, and so on.