How on earth are you supposed to get meaningful data from a report like this? Does nobody understay the attendant mental health strain of being in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. The fear uncertainty and complete disconnect from family and friends in many cases? And even outside of a pandemic, why should productivity be measured in just work output? Wouldn't it make more sense to look at overall mental health, work/life balance, stress etc? It's widely accepted that workplace stress is increasing, or was before COVID. We're about overdue to try and tackle that surely, before we face a new epidemic of mental health breakdown?
Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#72My 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…
My company (listed in the LSE) started measuring WFH productivity as soon as Covid started. The unstated objective was to demonstrate WFH reduced productivity, to have an argument to force everybody to go back to the office once the pandemic ended. Metrics were devised by the senior leadership team to serve their purpose. We (dev managers) were tasked with collecting these metrics. After 4-5 months all metrics improved across all teams, so the senior leadership team decided to change them. These new metrics improved as well, so the project was stopped and data was destroyed (lest ICs would find out and have arguments to WFH after the pandemic). Now they’ve started talking about our great office in city center, about the gym, the gaming room, the Friday drinks, the office vibe.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#73> Employees with children living at home increased hours workedmore than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than thosewithout children. This tells you all you need to know about the study. You can't analyse the relative effectiveness of working from home and working in the office when you're conflating "remote work" with "trying to get something done on your laptop on the ki…
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…
Thats actually interesting, I'm young and decided to go for my first "work from anywhere" and it's been almost two years now and I'm living currently in forest, my internet is slow and not stable... previously was living on small island in a wooden garage next to the beach with unstable GSM connection and no AC and right before it in a fantastic apartament in big city centre with stuning view and best internet connection I ever had.
Based on my experience it doesn't really matter from where but how frequent you change the location as it demands re-organisation from scratch every time.
Big factor in productivity is how satisfied you are from your life in general. When you feel cool and happy then even spending less time will bring more "wise" results than just being "ok" in a own fantastic apartament while hiting a wall for entire day trying to attack a problem.
To add one more thing, I was most productive living in this garage, working maybe 4h per day while rest of my time spending on bicycle, hiking, diving or talking with locals.
At this time my team mates were miserable and while declaring as they working the 8h, effects were not satisfying.
This is because even when I was doing other non-technical activities my brain was de-stressing but slowely building solutions for problems which I was executing later on in code and generally speaking I was livng a dream life as a "traveler".
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#74My 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…
> Sometimes taking a walk in the park to think through a problem is a dev task.
This 100%!
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#75My 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…
Interesting point about what developers prefer vs. what the data shows. Developers also prefer command-line tools even though data indicates that GUIs are more productive.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#76Having worked with a few large IT services companies, I’d question their definition of “productivity”. I suspect it’s related to Jira tickets completed or short term revenue (eg billable hours). I doubt it’s measured in terms of end user outcomes.
My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run.
For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#77My 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…
The way that your particular study was conducted might be interesting from a study standpoint but it doesn't match the typically accepted ways of doing agile development. For instance if you were studying metrics but not releasing those metrics immediately back to the Developers then there is no opportunity for them to improve from a feedback loop. This seems like a strong invalidation of the study itself.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. This contradicts the prevailing HN sentiment that WFH increases productivity because there's less time spent socializing or dealing with distractions.
Maybe if you do nothing but greenfield coding, but when does that ever happen? You'd need to be in a startup or a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years.
> a company with severe NIH that also likes to rewrite everything every few years.
Like a FAANG? Well at least, the F and and the G do.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#79My 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…
Hard truth coming in: The reason it doesn't work for your company is simply poor management (don't take it personally). What you actually measured is the ability of yourself and the rest of your managers to lead your teams in a situation when actual leadership is required.
You see most "managers" aren't really managing anything. "Coordinating" might be a better word. The problem is that coordinating is really just "managing without leadership", and in a WFH environment coordination alone isn't enough. You need people driving your teams, not sitting shotgun with the map reading off directions.
I think the most revealing question is a simple one: What metrics did you come up with to measure the productivity of your managers (and yourself) during this time? None? Of course not... You've probably heard the phrase that "managers are force-multipliers!". Does that apply when the multiplier is less than 1?
I am not disputing your results or even your conclusion, but it's important to know why you got the results you did. And even more important is accurately identifying the appropriate policy going forward: With your current management team you cannot continue with a WFH policy.
Re: Work from home and productivity: evidence from personnel and analytics data [pdf]
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Interesting point about what developers prefer vs. what the data shows. Developers also prefer command-line tools even though data indicates that GUIs are more productive.
>GUIs are more productive
From my first hand experience this generalization is wrong as it comes down to each individual developer.
We have highly skilled developers using vim and editing code very fast as well as other skilled developers using VS Code of Eclipse as plain text editors. Less skilled developers usually think that text editors like vim improve their quality/speed because the very skilled developers use them whereas they‘re usually lacking knowledge for concepts and the language. This leads to a double slowdown from less skilled developers struggling now with their editor and the work they‘re supposed to do.
It usually comes down to what each individual developer is comfortable with compared to what they think they should be using regardless if text or GUI based.