Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As someone else says in the thread, all these "assurances" are based on combinations personal preference and anecdote.

I am overall responsible for the team that produces and figures out developer productivity metrics for Google.

I can assure you there is lots and lots of real data on this, so there isn't a lot of need for random supposition based on people's desires (WFH vs not) and biases. There are too many comments in this thread to read every single one, but most suppositions i read seemed just to reflect biases and personal preferences rather than any real data.

It's IMHO a little odd to see people assume that any really successful tech company is not going to be able to figure out and succeed at maintaining whatever overall level of productivity they want (IE pre-covid, pre-covid-50%, pre-covid+50%). The ability to adapt and be productive/effective in changing conditions is often one of the things that makes companies successful in the first place.

The thing that is much harder to fix is stuff like personal well being.

Care to share some of that real data? You're right about the haze of wishful thinking around the issue and seem to be in a position to clear it up a bit. You can infer something about the value of face time from the universal FAANG commitment to centralized HQs, despite the huge costs of this policy.

Here's a longer answer:

I actually really wish i could (and other companies could), because I think it would make for some really interesting papers/studies/etc.

We normally publish a bunch of our productivity, inclusion, etc research in journals and conferences. For example, https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/ts/5555/01/09361116/1r...

For this particular topic, I believe we have published some small amount of stuff, and there is some public info in articles like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/how-google-improved-employee...

But I know for both us, and others i've talked to, there is a bunch of good reasons folks don't want to publish the more raw data, some privacy, some competitive, some legal, etc.

In this case, not releasing the data often means we don't publish more formal papers or studies because of the inability to make the underlying data available with the paper (for example).

I will say while this situation is a bit sad to me from an academic perspective, pragmatically, even with all the data from us, MS, apple, etc, i don't think it would pragmatically answer the broader questions for a whole ton of reasons.

It's definitely useful for research and further exploration, and trying to distill overall considerations and insight. It's probably useful on the internet to spike someone who says "WFH is more productive" or "Office is more productive".

But it also won't tell you what the future of work should be for your company.

Looks like, from the CNBC article, that WFH basically worsened the performance of low-level/ middle managers, which feels about right.

It also feels that some way of improving this group of people in general is sorely needed -- how does the G2G program work exactly?

ninjaedit: found this https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/learning-development-em... . Will evangelize at my company… probably will be ignored though because I'm an IC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com