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Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

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Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#51

Post by rightbyte »

londons_explore wrote: post #4
chmaynard wrote: post #2

This smells like bullshit. Show us all the data or retract the article.

It was a survey, and they quote the figures right there in the article...

They don't quote all the answers. Only the "high" answers.

"only 31% of the company’s engineers polled felt they had been highly productive, down 8 percentage points from a record high in the March quarter."

So 8 points down from a record. What is the usual variance on that statistics? Doesn't say much.

And like ... are employees really honest when asked 'anonymously' by a surveilence company how much they work?

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#52

Post by 29athrowaway »

People seem to forget that there are distractions at work as well.

And not all work environments have nice people. Some people can be toxic and not having them around is fantastic.

Remote work disarms toxic people because any toxic interaction can be either recorded or left in writing.

And if some loud person wants to dominate every meeting, now you have a mute button... that's great.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#53

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

bicx wrote: post #39
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #34

I've worked from home for about 6 years, with varying levels of success. But I've been surprised by how much I'm thrown off by having my kids home during the school day (remote learning because of covid). Even with a decently soundproof office. It just prevents the house in general from being calm and quiet during my peak work hours.

I am honestly concerned that I may be getting chronic ear issues from wearing noise-cancelling headphones constantly. Knowing that your family is right outside the door (and vice versa) is extremely challenging.

I'm really sorry to hear that. I wonder if it's possible to hunt down a physician with the knowledge necessary to give you a definitive answer. It seems like for now, noise mitigation is a necessary component of your work life.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#54

Post by JSavageOne »

Can't even read the article since it's behind a paywall.

But as someone who's been working remotely since before the pandemic, the key for me is to not work from home, ie. either work out of coffee shops or coworking spaces.

Of course the problem with COVID is that coffee shops are takeout only and coworking spaces are closed, so that's not an option at the moment (at least in the U.S.).

Working from home is awesome one or two days out of a week, but depressing after weeks and weeks. But then again I feel the same about offices as well, and hell just living in the same city year after year. The beauty of remote work is that you can go wherever you want, wake up whenever you want, and aren't tethered to a location. Once you taste that freedom, it's hard to give it up.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#55

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rightbyte wrote: post #37

"The number of [changelists] is a key metric the company uses to track productivity." Don't take the article seriusly.

Why? I'm sure Google has tons of historical data, and they have a large enough pool of developers where they likely get very consistent productivity metrics across the company. If they see an obvious, statistically significant dip in the number of changelists companywide, this seems like very useful data.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#56

Post by xt00 »

bicx wrote: post #28
xt00 wrote: post #18

I would guess based upon my own experience and talking to others: 1) the first 3-5 months were hard to figure out a good rhythm and is super impacted by how busy your house is (do you have kids, live-in parents, special needs kids etc) 2) many people have figured out a good rhythm by now and are doing fine 3) people who were new at the company this year are definitely having a much harder time since just sitting next…

I agree with most of what you said. I'm not sure how the last idea would work in the long run, as much as it should in an idealistic sense. I definitely agree that working from the office is better for some people than others. However, the unfortunate reality is if the boss is working from the office, it's often the case that people who are also in the office get better opportunities, recognition, and possibly result…

yea good point.. that would be a challenge for sure.. yea it would only take a couple of performance reviews before people got the message that they either need to move back to an on-site job situation or time to find another job.. so as a result the most likely scenario would be either entire org's would go all remote, or whole companies, or not at all.. the random lone wolf working from home will likely be the same set the company had before.. people working from like Zurich who is some machine learning genius or something, but otherwise, all the remaining people slowly trickle back into the office over the next 2 years..

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#57

Post by ilaksh »

I think we really need to be more specific about working situations than "at home" or "not at home".

Because there are vast differences between specific circumstances. For example, people who are working at home but also suddenly become substitute teachers to keep their kids on task who are also there, are in a totally different situation than people who have a nice quiet home office and no kids.

Also, the specific software setup and operating rules will have a massive difference. For example, people who need to collaborate daily and don't have a good rule for a meeting or a solid whiteboard tool or whatever they need, if they don't make that connection adequately, they are going to lag.

Or if you are just talking about basic motivation, the interaction rules and software setup will also make a huge difference. If there were somewhat ad-hoc assignments and check-ins that kept people somewhat more motivated before and then all of that is just dropped, the motivation will go down. Now ideally what you have instead is just good management, intrinsic motivation and properly chunked-out results-oriented sprints, strong async and written communication, etc.

Or in the opposite direction, if the boss realizes that now he doesn't need to go stand over your shoulder to check in with you or add a task since he can just message you on Slack at any time, that could also turn into a drag on programmer productivity.

So it's really dependant on a lot of specific factors and not just whether they are in an office or not. And I feel like discussions will need to break down some of those details to be useful.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#58

Post by tidepod12 »

xt00 wrote: post #18

I would guess based upon my own experience and talking to others: 1) the first 3-5 months were hard to figure out a good rhythm and is super impacted by how busy your house is (do you have kids, live-in parents, special needs kids etc) 2) many people have figured out a good rhythm by now and are doing fine 3) people who were new at the company this year are definitely having a much harder time since just sitting next…

>more likely a mix is going to be a good setup.. where very likely new people should expect to be onsite for fairly extended periods of time until they have a much better sense of what to work on

The model that I have seen with moderate-to-great levels of success at the large consulting companies (which have long had a strong remote work culture) is that the companies schedule new hires so that all new hires start at the same time every year, and for "new hire training", the company rents out an entire hotel for 2 months and has all new hires stay there. Those 2 months then are a mixture of intensive job training and social events.

By the end, all of the new hires have received plenty of training, had good conversations with managers/leadership about what type of work is expected, and IMO most importantly, have had a chance to make very strong bonds with coworkers that then become your "cohort" for the next 1-2 years that you can ask questions about work, collaborate, commiserate, or even become friends outside of work. The strong bond developed over those 2 months is important because that "cohort" is then more likely to stay in contact even after splitting up to work remotely.

I went through such a training program at the beginning of my career and it was the best company onboarding experience I've been through, not only in terms of personally enjoying it, but also just from the perspective of setting me up for success at the company and in my career.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#59

Post by bicx »

thurn wrote: post #48
bicx wrote: post #14

I think the key with working from home is learning to set up and maintain boundaries between home life and work life. I was working from home fulltime for well over a year prior to the pandemic. Prior to that, I went into an open office every day for about 10 years. Overall, if you subtract the time from a 1-hour round-trip commute, distractions from coworkers, and longer lunch breaks I had while going into the offic…

Also the personality type matrix of people who chose to work from home is different from the general population -- of course those people have higher wfh productivity. My wife is the most extroverted person I've ever met, so she's going to have a significantly harder time with remote work than someone who self-selected into it.

This is true! I didn't really choose to WFH personally. Instead, the startup I work for decided to ditch the office and go fully-remote. It ended up working out better for me than others, and personality definitely plays a big role.

Re: Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code from Home

#60

Post by jonny_eh »

bicx wrote: post #14

I think the key with working from home is learning to set up and maintain boundaries between home life and work life. I was working from home fulltime for well over a year prior to the pandemic. Prior to that, I went into an open office every day for about 10 years. Overall, if you subtract the time from a 1-hour round-trip commute, distractions from coworkers, and longer lunch breaks I had while going into the offic…

> I was doing better, but I need to tighten things up a bit

Why is your work more important than your wife? I see it as a feature that when WFH you can help your wife with the odd task in the middle of the day, which you couldn't do at the office.

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