4 ms·

How we increased productivity with a fruit basket at work

19 points by philou 8y ago

LeonB 8y ago
This is a good example of little improvements to team culture leaving to further compounding improvements. I give it 4 apples
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I disagree. I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing and belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket. If I have a blind spot in testing or bug finding because of my perspective as a developer, then my goal is to improve that skill for myself, because I am a professional and it matters for delivering a product to customers or stakeholders. If anything, events like this just make me question management and think, “these people have no idea what they’re doing... they want to satisfy some ego drive to be praised as inventive leaders by making shit up instead of just choosing the boring, well-known kinds of solutions.”
  - lmm 8y ago
    > I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing and belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket. This always just feels like negative-sum macho posturing to me. I'm a serious programmer and good at my job, but of course I'd rather have a fruit basket than not have a fruit basket.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      Not at all, especially because the status signalling effects are very real. If I accept the fruit basket from a manager with a shit-eating grin and act like a cheerleader about it, it’s a big net loss for me. I’m agreeing to a status system that devalues my work ethic and rewards managers for cheap tricks instead of true skill building or cultivating motivation. It positions me like a child in need of a parent to give me a gold star for doing my basic responsibilities. This way of management to cultivate “downward looking perspectives” that intentionally belittle or undermine subordinates is a very real and pervasive thing. A large part of the sociology book Moral Mazes is dedicated to the taxonomy and descriptive analysis of exactly this kind of corporate behavior.
    - rishabhsagar 8y ago
      But does that contribute in any way to your productivity? In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training. Flashy and marketable perks like fruit basket often unfortunately get prioritised over non sexy, but meaningful improvements and articles such as this, don’t help.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > But does that contribute in any way to your productivity? It contributes to my happiness, which is ultimately what I care about - productivity is another means to the same end. > In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training. You talk about things being "prioritised" but I just don't think that matches how these decisions are made. It's not like they're taking money out of some fixed pool (again, at a practical-decision-making level); I see no reason to think that fruit baskets make training less likely. (Indeed I'd say that providing fruit baskets speaks to a willingness to offer cheap-but-effective things, and I'd rather work for somewhere that tried to offer cheap-but-effective training than somewhere that tried to offer expensive training).
  - carlmr 8y ago
    >If I have a blind spot in testing or bug finding because of my perspective as a developer, then my goal is to improve that skill for myself, because I am a professional and it matters for delivering a product to customers or stakeholders. I don't know you, but most developers aren't robots, so little psychological tricks can help boost productivity. Of course you work for money, the money you already agreed in your salary negotiation. But this is not really that much about monetary incentives and more about creating a little playful competition that improves the product. I'd say people take a job for the salary, but a good salary in a bad team atmosphere won't lead to productivity. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate, I also hate forced company culture. But if it works, enough people must be willingly doing more work to best their colleagues.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      > “I don't know you, but most developers aren't robots” Huh? So wanting to get better at side skills in my job makes me a robot? Most developers I’ve worked with, apart from some exceptions (usually due to youthful inexperience or immaturity) definitely do proactively take it as their responsibility to improve job skills holistically. Any manager who thinks they need to use psychological tricks to get more from subordinates (or worse, believes they are clever for doing so) is somebody to run right on away from.
      - carlmr 8y ago
        >Huh? So wanting to get better at side skills in my job makes me a robot? No, but assuming there's no connection between the company culture and productivity assumes that developers are completely emotionless robots that only focus on skill development because of professionalism. Of course most developers do somehow proactively try to improve their skill set, but assuming that emotions and psychology don't matter, only salary, is very weird. Developers are often some of the most emotional people I know, they're curious, opinionated, playful etc. This is all from emotions, not from salaries, or purely self-driven. And if you use the innate playfulness and curiosity to improve the team, by creating little games like this, then you are doing one aspect of good management. Surely it shouldn't be your only management strategy, but nobody implied that.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    I used to think, "oh, cool, there's bagels." Or, "Oh nice, they bought us lunch and it's not pizza and soda.". But then those niceties go away. Then they stop filling open positions and I start nosing around. "Nope, the company is making money hand over fist." And then raises stop. And I inquire more. "Nope, the company is making money hand over fist." And the figures I find online back that up. So, no bagels, no new hires, no raises. Ok, so all the money is being shared only with the execs and the shareholders and not me. I don't care about fruit. Pay me. Period. That's my attitude anymore.
  - alliecat 8y ago
    Fruit's delicious though.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      “she still embodies all the awful stereotypes she did before!” ... “but she’s got a new hat!”
taneq 8y ago
I bet they would have improved productivity even more by re-introducing wolves.
rbinv 8y ago
What a bunch of clickbait nonsense. > After a few weeks, we had slashed bug fixing time, which increased productivity by 25%. The fruit baskets at work played a key role in this productivity increase! > In the end, it increased productivity by 25% Or, you know, maybe it was everything else you were doing differently? Such as http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata-to-gain-25-percent-of-productivity-part-5/ http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata... (which he even links to in the original post). I'm not saying that having a fruit basket can't necessarily make people happier and therefore more productive. But these claims are just ridiculous and almost impossible to measure properly.
- rzzzt 8y ago
  Now take away the fruit basket, productivity might improve again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- taneq 8y ago
  So it's the stone soup of optimisation.
mgiannopoulos 8y ago
So now click-baits, sensational content have expanded to developers blog. That’s just great. They seem like they did some good work analysing how they spend their time and what their goals should be. What’s the need for the nonsense?
jacknews 8y ago
So, 25% more work achieved for the company and it's shareholders/owners, have a banana?
robmaister 8y ago
I have mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, it's giving an incentive to working on the "boring" stuff that devs prefer not to do, on the other hand, it's something that can be gamed and result in poorer code quality (patching the symptom). Also, it seems like the company focus shifted to reducing bugs and general code quality. That probably has something to do with the huge shift in productivity as measured by bug count.

19 points by philou 8y ago

This is a good example of little improvements to team culture leaving to further compounding improvements. I give it 4 apples

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I disagree. I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing and belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket. If I have a blind spot in testing or bug finding because of my perspective as a developer, then my goal is to improve that skill for myself, because I am a professional and it matters for delivering a product to customers or stakeholders. If anything, events like this just make me question management and think, “these people have no idea what they’re doing... they want to satisfy some ego drive to be praised as inventive leaders by making shit up instead of just choosing the boring, well-known kinds of solutions.”
- lmm 8y ago
  > I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing and belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket. This always just feels like negative-sum macho posturing to me. I'm a serious programmer and good at my job, but of course I'd rather have a fruit basket than not have a fruit basket.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Not at all, especially because the status signalling effects are very real. If I accept the fruit basket from a manager with a shit-eating grin and act like a cheerleader about it, it’s a big net loss for me. I’m agreeing to a status system that devalues my work ethic and rewards managers for cheap tricks instead of true skill building or cultivating motivation. It positions me like a child in need of a parent to give me a gold star for doing my basic responsibilities. This way of management to cultivate “downward looking perspectives” that intentionally belittle or undermine subordinates is a very real and pervasive thing. A large part of the sociology book Moral Mazes is dedicated to the taxonomy and descriptive analysis of exactly this kind of corporate behavior.
  - rishabhsagar 8y ago
    But does that contribute in any way to your productivity? In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training. Flashy and marketable perks like fruit basket often unfortunately get prioritised over non sexy, but meaningful improvements and articles such as this, don’t help.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > But does that contribute in any way to your productivity? It contributes to my happiness, which is ultimately what I care about - productivity is another means to the same end. > In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training. You talk about things being "prioritised" but I just don't think that matches how these decisions are made. It's not like they're taking money out of some fixed pool (again, at a practical-decision-making level); I see no reason to think that fruit baskets make training less likely. (Indeed I'd say that providing fruit baskets speaks to a willingness to offer cheap-but-effective things, and I'd rather work for somewhere that tried to offer cheap-but-effective training than somewhere that tried to offer expensive training).
- carlmr 8y ago
  >If I have a blind spot in testing or bug finding because of my perspective as a developer, then my goal is to improve that skill for myself, because I am a professional and it matters for delivering a product to customers or stakeholders. I don't know you, but most developers aren't robots, so little psychological tricks can help boost productivity. Of course you work for money, the money you already agreed in your salary negotiation. But this is not really that much about monetary incentives and more about creating a little playful competition that improves the product. I'd say people take a job for the salary, but a good salary in a bad team atmosphere won't lead to productivity. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate, I also hate forced company culture. But if it works, enough people must be willingly doing more work to best their colleagues.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    > “I don't know you, but most developers aren't robots” Huh? So wanting to get better at side skills in my job makes me a robot? Most developers I’ve worked with, apart from some exceptions (usually due to youthful inexperience or immaturity) definitely do proactively take it as their responsibility to improve job skills holistically. Any manager who thinks they need to use psychological tricks to get more from subordinates (or worse, believes they are clever for doing so) is somebody to run right on away from.
    - carlmr 8y ago
      >Huh? So wanting to get better at side skills in my job makes me a robot? No, but assuming there's no connection between the company culture and productivity assumes that developers are completely emotionless robots that only focus on skill development because of professionalism. Of course most developers do somehow proactively try to improve their skill set, but assuming that emotions and psychology don't matter, only salary, is very weird. Developers are often some of the most emotional people I know, they're curious, opinionated, playful etc. This is all from emotions, not from salaries, or purely self-driven. And if you use the innate playfulness and curiosity to improve the team, by creating little games like this, then you are doing one aspect of good management. Surely it shouldn't be your only management strategy, but nobody implied that.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I used to think, "oh, cool, there's bagels." Or, "Oh nice, they bought us lunch and it's not pizza and soda.". But then those niceties go away. Then they stop filling open positions and I start nosing around. "Nope, the company is making money hand over fist." And then raises stop. And I inquire more. "Nope, the company is making money hand over fist." And the figures I find online back that up. So, no bagels, no new hires, no raises. Ok, so all the money is being shared only with the execs and the shareholders and not me. I don't care about fruit. Pay me. Period. That's my attitude anymore.
- alliecat 8y ago
  Fruit's delicious though.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    “she still embodies all the awful stereotypes she did before!” ... “but she’s got a new hat!”

taneq 8y ago

I bet they would have improved productivity even more by re-introducing wolves.

rbinv 8y ago

What a bunch of clickbait nonsense. > After a few weeks, we had slashed bug fixing time, which increased productivity by 25%. The fruit baskets at work played a key role in this productivity increase! > In the end, it increased productivity by 25% Or, you know, maybe it was everything else you were doing differently? Such as http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata-to-gain-25-percent-of-productivity-part-5/ http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata... (which he even links to in the original post). I'm not saying that having a fruit basket can't necessarily make people happier and therefore more productive. But these claims are just ridiculous and almost impossible to measure properly.

rzzzt 8y ago
Now take away the fruit basket, productivity might improve again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
taneq 8y ago
So it's the stone soup of optimisation.

mgiannopoulos 8y ago

So now click-baits, sensational content have expanded to developers blog. That’s just great. They seem like they did some good work analysing how they spend their time and what their goals should be. What’s the need for the nonsense?

jacknews 8y ago

So, 25% more work achieved for the company and it's shareholders/owners, have a banana?

robmaister 8y ago

I have mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, it's giving an incentive to working on the "boring" stuff that devs prefer not to do, on the other hand, it's something that can be gamed and result in poorer code quality (patching the symptom). Also, it seems like the company focus shifted to reducing bugs and general code quality. That probably has something to do with the huge shift in productivity as measured by bug count.