What remote work does to engineering productivity
okayhq.com
okayhq.com
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 orders keep everyone locked indoors with minimal activities to do outside of work.
The pandemic is challenging for many people, including people like me, who are full time remote workers. It's a poor time to evaluate the productivity differences of remote versus non-remote workers.
This article states:
> Operational improvements — like scientific experiments — shouldn't operate on guesses and hope. In our current mass experiment of remote work, we should form hypotheses, act deliberately, and measure results.
One of the most critical things you must consider when designing an experiment is confounding variables. COVID-19 didn't just shift people to remote work. It created a lot of stress, anxiety, and changed society dramatically in more ways than simply moving people's office locations. It cannot be ignored in judging the efficacy of remote work as a subject.
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.
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
> [More sophisticated tools] can understand these aspects' in-depth impact on your productivity, catching the unseen blockers and pain points that remote work has brought. Then, based on that data, you can implement changes and measure the results.
… which links to their product. The submitter/author is the co-founder.
> Not only have office interruptions increased; for many engineers, home life poses an entirely new set of challenges.
It's a different set of interruptions. In the office, I have all the din and chaos of all of my coworkers around me, since private offices and cubicles have fallen out of fashion in favor of stuffing in as many people in as few square feet as possible.
At home, well, I don't have an office there either, since when the average cost of a home is north of $1M in many metros¹, home ownership is fairly out of reach, even for a SWE. No home, and no apartment big enough, means I also don't have a home office. I also didn't have a desk or chair, either; I started this pandemic at a couch and coffee table, and found out the rest of the world was too when I started shopping for desks and chairs and they were well out of stock.
> If an engineer in an office needed a mouse or monitor, the company would buy them the relevant tools.
Most companies will buy tooling for, but the company; that is, whatever is purchased is owned by the company. I don't partake in this, as it's an incredible amount of e-waste.
¹and in most of the data I've seen, rent:wage is high in any geo. "SWEs are paid more" is true, but it doesn't change the cost of a house. Put them in terms of salary years to control for changes over time, and it's 3-10× (depending on location) more expensive for me than it was for my father, who held a similar "highly paid" service industry job.
In other words, worker compensation has not kept up with increases in the cost of living, and even engineers are not exempt from this trend.
I'm not sure raising corporate taxes is the right solution — that would just seem to share with the government. I am in favor of raising the minimum wage; in particular, the graph of minimum wage adjusted for inflation is what convinces me: we're near a low point, for minimum wage, presently[1]. I am in favor of better collective bargaining. (E.g., unions, but this seems to be highly contentious; and I would ban forced arbitration & non-competes, but IME most people are either completely ignorant on these issues, or misunderstand what is meant by "forced" to mean "all arbitration"…)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
There’s also no opportunity for the kind of work-related conversations that might happen over lunch where I’d learn more about the team, the org, the project, and the history of it all. In the past I’ve gotten a lot out of being present for casual conversations among more experienced teammates and asking the occasional question.
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.
Just ask the question on a channel or send a message to the person. They'll reply when they get back or can.
And to the other side, if you get a message, you don't have to drop it all to respond immediately. We are all adults and professionals. I'm not going to be doing nothing waiting for the answer while you reply.
> There’s also no opportunity for the kind of work-related conversations that might happen over lunch where I’d learn more about the team, the org, the project, and the history of it all.
This is true. We've worked out some times in the past where we get to expense things and everyone just chills and talks. People can come in and out, turn cameras on or not. It's nice to just talk.
> I started a new job during the pandemic,
I will say, it depends on the team and company. I've been remote for years and it varies a lot. If the company/team wasn't remote before, they might not have the tools or knowledge to make it work. That's what I'm gathering from a lot of friends comparing our situations.
Honestly this is just leadership dropping the ball for you and the rest of the team (though it can be easy to miss since it’s sort of a hidden problem). They should put more remote team things together like group learning sessions or just having coffee for 30 minutes to chat. It’s not hard to get on a calendar and although work required socialization is usually eye-roll worthy it does help.
I think it's an invisible problem because the decision makers and influential people in the organisation were mostly around before lockdown, so they already know everyone - they know who to ask when they have a problem, they have a feeling for who is friendly, who can be helpful etc. So to most of the staff that aspect just doesn't cross their radar.
It's very easy for remote work to feel much more contractual - you do the work needed for your team and deliver it. You lose the wider context - which I think makes it very hard for the wider team to change direction or have new ideas. The fallout of that inflexibility is intangible and immeasurable, but I bet it will come eventually.
An organisation has to both be productive on a daily basis and choose correctly what to work on. If you don't do both, you fail. Working remotely broadly improves the first, but I think without really good systems in place it completely throws off the second one.
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.
That depends on everyone being disciplined enough to keep their status up to date.
This Government response to COVID, and WFH, seems to have frozen people's career and social status as it was at the end of 2019.
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.
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.
Using repo metadata to arrive at productivity metrics always strikes me as willfully bullheaded. If you timestamp my keystrokes, you can't know when I designed the algorithm I'm coding with those keystrokes. Spoiler alert: it was probably while I was falling asleep the night before.
I do agree that GitPrime, GitHub Insights and other similar solutions are pushing developer metrics in a dangerous direction, by latching onto low hanging fruit metrics. I written a bit about what I believe is a positive direction and this is focusing on impact, which I talk about at
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=26457072&goto=threads%...
Developers are more burnt out than ever whilst needing less money to live. Remote work generally reduces living costs: no travel expenses, no expensive lunches, no expensive coffees etc.
A 4 day week reduces burnout at a time when many developers are spending less. Of course, the best outcome would be 4 day roles @ 100% salary, but often this isn't possible.
I honestly believe in years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I've just launched https://www.fourdayweek.io/ (shameless plug)
Perhaps in 18 years, when I'm an empty nester, I can revisit this opinion.
Why would I do that? ... just saying. Maybe my family needs allow me to spend only 7 dedicated hours (plus commute) for work.
I think the corporations will go crazy coordinating such things. Retail where this happens is quite different and continuity of 1-person to another may not be important there, but in many corporate roles, continuity is important.
My question to you: why 4 days? Why not 3? Why not 2? Seems as arbitrary as 5.
> remote work is currently at the peak of its hype cycle
And after infographic-y content, the author ends by claiming that we should run experiments (presumably because there's not enough data). Followed, of course by a plug for product.
This is garbage content!
A
It's the pandemic. Next question.
Prepandemic WFH was amazing. During the pandemic, it is bad and ruined the experience at this point, I doubt I will do it after, but I hope it is just my current impression because the benefits and freedom were so fun.
The difference is hard to pinpoint but it had a lot to do with the assumptions on the other end of the phone.
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.