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At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

bloomberg.com

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

#231

Post by whywhywhywhy »

avolcano wrote: post #74
daxfohl wrote: post #71

I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue. I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office. Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wro…

This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do…

> The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future.

Stop reading twitter, stop watching the news. Honestly the world isn’t representative to what they’re reporting and they profit from selling you fear.

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

#232

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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

The news isn’t reality, it’s the world through the lens of what the journalist who reports it wants you to see. They don’t report objective reality. They will willingly admit that their job isn’t reporting objective reality if you ask them.

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

#233

Post by etripe »

alephu5 wrote: post #186
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't productivity, productivity is value/duration.

You're absolutely right, but in "Agile" teams this is exactly how they measure productivity: story points (cost)/sprint (duration)

And that is exactly why management shouldn't be looking at or comparing burndown charts. It's too tempting to see IT as a cost centre instead of an enabler.

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

#234

Post by imtringued »

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…

The real problem isn't measuring the productivity of doing work in its entirety. Installing plumbing is a job. Since only one person is doing the plumbing and that person only does plumbing you can measure the productivity of that job and attribute it directly to a single person.

Once you have a group of people all working together on the same job or the inverse where you have a single person do a variety of jobs everything is different.

You split the big job into smaller jobs and distribute them to people. Some jobs are easier and bring in more money and therefore are more "productive" than others. But all jobs have to be done, no matter how productive they are. So you end up handing easy and difficult work to people. When you start to measure individual productivity of each team member you start noticing that there is a huge variance in productivity. Some people are "useless" while others are highly productive. When you remove the "least productive" people from the job then you notice something odd. Suddenly the productivity of everyone else goes down as well. Your productivity measurements were actually just measuring the way you distributed the jobs.

I remember a machinist talking about how he spends all his day fixing his coworkers mistakes. They kept breaking $100 tools (tool as in endmills) which jammed the machines and he's the only one who did the thankless job of making the machines usable again. He made fixtures that his coworkers broke and then he made them again.... Oh and he had a quota of how many parts he has to make per day. After all, measuring the productivity of a machinist should be pretty easy. Just count how many parts he makes per day. Of course the coworkers always exceeded the quota while he was always well below the quota.

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

#236

Post by etripe »

cryptonector wrote: post #177
Barrin92 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The question that we need to ask more often is, if productivity is so hard to measure, maybe it is possibly because we might not be creating as much value as we have largely tricked ourselves into believing we have. at a very low level productivity is hard to measure because it's tacit and implicit rather than explicit. The reason why we can measure the productivity of a business is because it responds to price sign…

This. The productivity of a business is its ROI, roughly its profit + reinvestment. The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs. It's much harder to measure the productivity of an individual employee who is not a salesperson or directly supporting sales. Some are rockstars, and these you know when you see them. But the rest... it's harder to tell. Metrics can only…

> The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs.

It's not that simple, because most companies don't perform inter-departmental cost accounting. A salesperson might seem to be very productive, while actually selling made-up solutions that are very cost-intensive to implement. To get a real number on how productive they are, you would need to measure:

([sum of sales * price] - [sum of solutions sold * implementation cost]) / compensation

or even:

customer price * weighted average of per-deal profit margin / total compensation

The cost to implement isn't added value. This kind of internal debiting would also change how management looks at IT. If they can solve the problem for less than the estimated cost by the salesperson, they're turning a profit. If they're taking longer due to "science fiction" products being sold, the blame lies squarely with sales. As it is now, salespeople are mainly incentivised for units sold and total price for deals made. You can be a rockstar salesperson while simultaneously mainly causing huge problems downstream.

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

#237

Post by jackguy »

dmurray wrote: post #228
swarnie_ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm going to code myself a minivan" Could you explain this term? I thought i was a native English speaker but this has lost me.

"I'm going to get myself a large bonus by clearing many bugs". The Dilbert strip has the additional suggestion that the programmer could introduce bugs in order to clear them, in an example of the Cobra Effect.

Or the AI vaccuum cleaner problem. If the target is to scrape maximum amount of dust then it would clean-dump-clean to maximize efficiency.

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

#238

Post by Schiendelman »

xorcist wrote: post #216
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…

One thing that has stuck with the after many years of working with IT is that the big projects with resources to spare, the few that really gives you time to do the work properly for once, are often the one that ends up with the most tech debt. It is completely contrary to my own feeling that debt is created by external pressure to deliver too fast. I can see why that would create perverse incentives should a project…

What I’ve found over the last 20 years: Tech debt scales with amount of code written, regardless of other factors.

If you write the minimum amount to validate the business need, you have minimum debt. :)

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

#239

Post by pocket_titan »

jimmytucson wrote: post #156
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Doesn’t happen to the same degree as in software. With plumbing or painting, yes there are good jobs and bad jobs, but if the water gets to where it’s going and there’s no moisture, you’re pretty much done. If the paint is on the wall and not on the ceiling or the trim, and you can’t see roller marks, it’s a good job. With software, there seem to be endless layers of nuance between good or bad, finished or unfinished…

With all due respect, you probably know more about software than plumbing, maybe leading you to simplify a bit. Because the same logic could be applied to plumbing, but any plumber might see more variables, the way you do with software.

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

#240

Post by Retric »

coredog64 wrote: post #143
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.

We have Slack and Zoom both, but once we start to involve a bunch of people, we wind up moving to voice and video. Sure, we captured all 6 hours of the call —- Who is up for finding a random 15 second snippet of conversation?

Automatic transcripts are surprisingly useful for this as you can simply search for key words. Their far from perfect especially when multiple people are talking, but all you really need is a time stamp.
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