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i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home. so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home

by kmlx 6y ago

i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home. so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why. since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure. what i found is a big productivity drop. in some cases there was 40% less work done from home than from the office. and this happened gradually over the course of a year. and since i know people working for big corps in HK i’ve asked them to do the same. their company’s productivity increased slightly (5%<). they were never forced to work from home. this is by no means a scientific study, but i was surprised at the huge drops i was seeing, and even more surprised at the continuous drop off across the time line. did anyone else notice this, or are just my clients outliners? what will wfh do to the productivity difference between asian countries and western ones? will this apparent productivity loss be offset somehow?

Arainach 6y ago
You're ignoring the variables that conflate. Plenty of people I know are burnt out, tired, and not as productive as they are at their peak. This isn't "WFH". This is WFH and quarantine and not being able to travel or take travelling vacations and worrying about your health and the health of everyone you care about and schooling at home and a pandemic and......you get the point. No data claiming a productivity drop during this pandemic can be isolated to WFH with any reliability. I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.
guilhas 6y ago
Definitely down. Not sure if because the amount of distractions at home, kid, pet, things to tidy up... or if because people are taking this more like exceptional times, so it is OK to slack.
hnedeotes 6y ago
you should add number of lines written for it to be scientific.
- oblio 6y ago
  Let me introduce you to my friend, --funroll-loop: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge... Well, that's just a fun detour, I meant manual loop unrolling: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops
  - hnedeotes 6y ago
    I only had time to go through the gentoo one. Although I never used gentoo and think that minimal perf improvements like those mentioned throughout are silly in exchange for having to know all the incantations and borking your OS every other monday, vs having something that works out of the box, I don't disagree entirely with the binary/source idea. But it would need a different kind of OS and lib organisation than the ones we have right now to make it feasible.
    - oblio 6y ago
      It's a super old joke from at least 10 years ago, when computers were much less powerful and compiling everything was silly for a desktop OS. You'd get 1-2% increased performance and you'd have to spend tens of hours compiling everything :-) A bit of a shame since Gentoo is quite a nice distro. Read the second one, it's much shorter. It's just a joke about people "unrolling loops" manually, i.e. not using loops, so that their line count goes up (for people paid per LOC).
odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
I have been working from home for about 10 years. I have been a top performer in most companies I worked with, promotions, etc. My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents). Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me. I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal. So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.
nonameiguess 6y ago
You're close to the right idea, but "easy to measure" is exactly the problem here. Tickets close is not a meaningful measure of productivity. It's better than commits, though. I've been pushing commits far less frequently since working from home, but it isn't because I'm actually pushing less code. It's because I no longer need to push to a central Git server in order to share with myself between a company-issued laptop I use when I am contributing from home and my office desktop when I'm in the office. I only have code in one place, and I only need to commit and push when I'm confident it's actually working, not as an adhoc sharing mechanism between devices that can't share storage. Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
piva00 6y ago
What you failed to account for is that we are all working from home during a global health crisis. I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside. The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have). We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.
ProZsolt 6y ago
I loved working from home pre-pandemic. But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat. I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice. I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.

by kmlx 6y ago

Arainach 6y ago

You're ignoring the variables that conflate. Plenty of people I know are burnt out, tired, and not as productive as they are at their peak. This isn't "WFH". This is WFH and quarantine and not being able to travel or take travelling vacations and worrying about your health and the health of everyone you care about and schooling at home and a pandemic and......you get the point. No data claiming a productivity drop during this pandemic can be isolated to WFH with any reliability. I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.

guilhas 6y ago

Definitely down. Not sure if because the amount of distractions at home, kid, pet, things to tidy up... or if because people are taking this more like exceptional times, so it is OK to slack.

hnedeotes 6y ago

you should add number of lines written for it to be scientific.

oblio 6y ago
Let me introduce you to my friend, --funroll-loop: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge... Well, that's just a fun detour, I meant manual loop unrolling: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops
- hnedeotes 6y ago
  I only had time to go through the gentoo one. Although I never used gentoo and think that minimal perf improvements like those mentioned throughout are silly in exchange for having to know all the incantations and borking your OS every other monday, vs having something that works out of the box, I don't disagree entirely with the binary/source idea. But it would need a different kind of OS and lib organisation than the ones we have right now to make it feasible.
  - oblio 6y ago
    It's a super old joke from at least 10 years ago, when computers were much less powerful and compiling everything was silly for a desktop OS. You'd get 1-2% increased performance and you'd have to spend tens of hours compiling everything :-) A bit of a shame since Gentoo is quite a nice distro. Read the second one, it's much shorter. It's just a joke about people "unrolling loops" manually, i.e. not using loops, so that their line count goes up (for people paid per LOC).

odshoifsdhfs 6y ago

I have been working from home for about 10 years. I have been a top performer in most companies I worked with, promotions, etc. My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents). Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me. I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal. So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.

nonameiguess 6y ago

You're close to the right idea, but "easy to measure" is exactly the problem here. Tickets close is not a meaningful measure of productivity. It's better than commits, though. I've been pushing commits far less frequently since working from home, but it isn't because I'm actually pushing less code. It's because I no longer need to push to a central Git server in order to share with myself between a company-issued laptop I use when I am contributing from home and my office desktop when I'm in the office. I only have code in one place, and I only need to commit and push when I'm confident it's actually working, not as an adhoc sharing mechanism between devices that can't share storage. Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.

piva00 6y ago

What you failed to account for is that we are all working from home during a global health crisis. I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside. The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have). We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.

ProZsolt 6y ago

I loved working from home pre-pandemic. But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat. I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice. I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.