8 ms·
Factors driving a productivity explosion
- asylteltine 3y agoYep it’s true. If you have managers who understand remote work it’s great.
- ab8 3y agoProving that all their jobs can now be outsourced to other countries for half the price. Thanks a lot.
- zlg_codes 3y agoBurning fossil fuels for X*Y travel to Z place to do the same job they could do at home, is better? If they can do it cheaper elsewhere in the world then they clearly are not focusing on the premium values of more expensive workers. Naturally, having native speakers with good education should be seen as better than importing. If importing is ever actually better, then one has to question the value of the education being given to the premium workers.
- diob 3y agoThis is a joke right? Most remote companies still have timezone restrictions, and the closest places to outsource from America in terms of timezone generally have great worker protections (aka, hard to fire). For the most part, you'll find American companies that are remote are simply hiring from all over America, not the world.
- api 3y agoAlso really good developers overseas are not that much cheaper, especially when you add the cost of hiring and managing that far away.
- voisin 3y agoThis is just not remotely true. I am not sure what you are referring to but even between the US and Canada it is completely incorrect, let alone Eastern Europe and the US. What are you possibly talking about?
- geodel 3y agoThe operating phrase is really good developers. Because most companies are just churning out basic CRUD micro services. Infact companies emphasis on standardized frameworks is part of this trend. It makes rather easy to replace one dev with another. Companies can and are using vast quantities of developers at far away locations.
- api 3y agoThose jobs are most likely to be replaced by AI or by skilled developers using AI as a force multiplier. I already know developers using AI successfully to automate boilerplate and routine code generation, leaving them more free to spend time on the hard stuff. AI is cheaper than outsourced labor.
- jmye 3y agoMost remote companies don’t need time zone restrictions, and many Indian contractors are already working weird schedules to at least partially align with US time zones. I don’t expect that every company can outsource every WFH job, but the idea that they can’t because it might make a conference call hard is, frankly, rank nonsense.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoOn paper, sure. I have fired offshore teams and hired US ones because I prefer people who think, care, look at the big picture, share their experience, and write quality working software, once. Offshore software felt like someone building a car by spotwelding everything together for record times.
- hotpotamus 3y agoBefore the pandemic, I was told by private equity people that if a job can be done from home, it can be done from India. And the job I had back then is now more or less done from India.
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoThe job absolutely can be done from India. The location isn't the question; the right person is, and the sort of people who say that are the sort who suck at hiring, and don't care. "Hire cheap labor."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pokepim 3y ago[dead]
- PhoenixReborn 3y agoThanks to an increasing supply of jobs in India, salaries have been rising at the top end of the market. In another 5-10 years, it won't be much cheaper to hire in India as compared to the US.
- kibwen 3y agoIf they could, private equity people would reduce you and your family to chattel slavery and Fargo you into a woodchipper when your wasted body finally gives out. They're the problem, not remote work.
- xkekjrktllss 3y agoPrivate equity is an inevitability of a financialised capitalist economy, so what are you suggesting? Some sort of vigilante justice?
- kibwen 3y agoThere are innumerable ways to avert the worst iniquities of private equity without going Full Communist Revolution. Of course, the longer that plutocrats try to wring the system dry, the more likely the latter is to happen, but I suppose it would be incoherent of me to expect private equity to understand the concept of thinking in the long-term.
- koolba 3y agoOr that they just weren’t doing that much work in the office either.
- ddmichael 3y agoRecruiting is hard. Global recruiting is really hard.
- mynameishere 3y agoAs others mention, there are a range of reasons why Joe Coder keeps his job. Realistically, one of those reasons (like it or not) is that management can see him every day and can go to his cube for face-to-face meetings. They never could do that with Jorge Coder (who is in the same timezone by the way). Well, now it doesn't matter.
- zer00eyz 3y agoI have been WFH for over a decade now. Before that I survived the first dot com bubble, 2008 housing crisis. I have been through rounds of layoffs and all sorts of outsourcing projects. At some point it all boils down to numbers. Why hire a Bay Area resource when a Kansas one is cheaper? Why hire a Kansas one when someone globally is cheaper? I think that the only reason we haven't seen deeper cuts and more tech layoffs and outsourcing is that everyone is skittish about sending work to Eastern Europe. With that venue cut off the remaining tech markets remain higher priced and look a lot less appealing. There are reasons to be in an office sometimes. Planing, team building, those exchanges around the coffee pot. The random engineer who prarridogs and spouts an answer to the problem you're discussing with someone else. Pick your poison, a week every month, a month every quarter get that team building and face time in, pick up the value it has and then go back to WFH and zero commute... The answer isn't no office its "hot desk when it matters"!
- metadat 3y agohttps://archive.today/iOP3c https://archive.today/iOP3c
- nelsondev 3y agoAnother factor improving productivity is AI tools. I for one, am more productive writing code with the help of a generative AI.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI am maybe slightly more productive. The hard parts of the job are not solved by generated code.
- roughly 3y agoI’m not an “AI” booster, but - you’re right, but also the hard parts of the job aren’t actually the majority of the job, and the new tools are definitely making a bunch of the other stuff take less of my time. They don’t do the job for you, but they’re pretty good leverage if you use them right. (Although I’ll say I’m also a bit lazier - I’ve accepted some autocomplete suggestions that are definitely worse than what I’d write myself, but they’re a whole lot faster than my version.)
- apwell23 3y agohelping me arrive to final code faster by AI writing all my ideas and playing around . It makes hardest part easier.
- jakeogh 3y agohuge plus for parents
- majormajor 3y agoI can't get past the paywall, but commute traffice where I live is near pre-pandemic-levels suggesting a significant amount of non-WFH is going on; so I'm curious if there are specific stats pulled in the article pointing to increased productivity from just the WFH cohort vs the economy as a whole?
- ghaff 3y agoMy drives into Boston for work when I go suggest that traffic is at least as bad as ever. (Although commuter rail on the rare occasions when I do, seems distinctly below pre-pandemic levels.) But overall things seem to be a lot closer to the before-times than not even if people who live in the city have some influence (though if I had an easy walking or public transit commute I'd go into the office a lot more).
- karaterobot 3y ago> Essentially, Daco adds, productivity has rebounded above its 2017-to-2019 norms, which he believes indicates that it’s “not just a quick bounceback,” but actually stronger than the prior trend—a positive development. There's the quote that implies that return to office is not the explanation for this productivity rebound. Work from home is still far higher than it was in 2019, and so is productivity. While far from a smoking gun, this is more up to date evidence that execs who threatened to fire people who didn't RTO are as wrong as they seemed. The first executive who recants on their intuition that RTO would bring about an explosion of productivity above WFH will earn my respect. My position isn't that every job that can be WFH should be, but that every person who wants to be WFH should be able to, and everyone who wants to work in an office should be able to. Even if working in an office is less productive, and costs the company a lot more money, and reduces the pool of talent, some employees still want it. Some executives do too: these people will be happier working together, so they should have that option.
- timr 3y ago> There's the quote that implies that return to office is not the explanation for this productivity rebound. Work from home is still far higher than it was in 2019, and so is productivity. ...or maybe there's another factor, and this doesn't explain anything at all. Correlation does not imply causality. We have LLMs now, we didn't have them in 2019, and productivity is up. Ergo, increased productivity must be caused by LLMs. Right?
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoThe mistake is the singular belief in productivity. If you nail that, and the org doesn't want WFH, they'll just move the goalposts to collaboration. Or face time. They're free to retcon a rationale onto their self-justified decision.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoOutside of manufacturing widgets/hour, it feels incredibly difficult to even pin down productivity. Day to day, I bang out some code. Am I doing it better or worse than last week? No idea. WFH, definitely leaves me less drained from commuting, but I cannot point to any hard metrics one way or the other.
- shostack 3y agoI'd assert the mistake is thinking this is about an objective measure of productivity vs more pragmatic commercial real estate investments and in cases of poor leadership/management, needing to have people physically present to provide a sense of control.
- asynchronous 3y agoPersonally I counted over 5 emails I’ve received in the past year at work saying something like “great job staying productive at home- we’re just as (or more) profitable than pre-pandemic!” And then later in that email having some rhetoric along the lines of “we’ll be working towards a return to office in order to make sure we’re giving it our best.” It’s either one or the other- don’t doublespeak to me.
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoHave an exit plan? Just in case . . .
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- phendrenad2 3y agoThis article is pathetic. It doesn't even mention the threat of being laid off as a source of motivation to work harder, which I suspect is the real mechanism here.
- Ericson2314 3y agoUnlikely with unemployment this low
- phendrenad2 3y agoUnemployment statistics take into account all jobs. This productivity increase (really only 5.2% in a quarter) only takes into account business workers. Also unemployment is basically worthless if you have a high-paying job, it's literally better to go work for Walmart than collect unemployment while looking for another white-collar job at the moment. And unemmployment numbers only take into account people collecting unemployment. So no, I don't think the unemployment numbers relevant.
- Ericson2314 3y agoI am saying: why in a very strong labor market would the threat of being laid off be compelling greater productivity improvements than before?
- phendrenad2 3y agoBecause the strong labor market is not equally distributed.
- Ericson2314 3y agoOK, thanks. While I am still a bit skeptical this is definitely a more plausible claim now. Class warfare making high productivity white collar work harder, haha.
- mym1990 3y ago
- sublinear 3y agoWhat really matters is whether there is high quality communication, not all this other superficial stuff. Nobody cares about your comfort, costs, etc. All of you who keep stubbornly making those arguments are completely missing the point. Yes, you may be more productive working from home simply because your work is full of dense text, and exacting and deliberate decisions. Not even the dumbest exec or manager is saying you're not. These articles aren't about you. The majority of office workers aren't programmers.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoThis story neglects to mention one of the biggest factors likely driving productivity: remote work expands the labor pool available to employers, thus making it easier for employers to find the right match for the job at the right price. Before the pandemic, employers were mainly limited to employing workers within approximately an hour commute. With this restriction loosened, they can now more easily found workers better suited (i.e more productive) for a role than the previously available local options. Over time, this will work to increase aggregate wages, as productivity increases are the main driver of wages.
- mym1990 3y agoProductivity and the link to wages has diverged lots since the 1970s in the US. In a vacuum it certainly follows that productivity should enable wage growth, this hasn’t played out as much in the real world. Once you factor in inflation, wages have hardly risen in comparison to productivity. The reality is that the wage level is the intersection what an employee thinks they can get and what the employer thinks they can get away with, and usually the employer has the upper hand.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoThere is healthy debate about the ‘great uncoupling’ in the US between 1970 and 2010. There is no debate however that historically productivity increases have been a necessary precondition for sustained wage growth. Moreover, the present discussion is about whether WFH may or may not be affecting productivity, not my tangential side comment about the link between productivity and wages.
- mym1990 3y agoRemote work expanding the pool of worker supply will cause wages to go down. If there are 100 people competing for a position, there is much less upward wage pressure than if there are only 10 people. Conversely, there are now more jobs for remote workers to apply to, so they also have a larger supply of jobs to choose from, pushing wages up, theoretically. At the end of the day it’s probably closer to a wash than anything else.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoWe founded a software startup in 1999. And I've worked as fractional CTO recently. My impression, we have not utilized productivity due to cloud, better tools, better SaaS (Hubspot, Linkedin, Pipedrive, Google Analytics etc.). To me it looks like all productivity gains have been eaten up by something. I feel Scrum is very undproductive, this might be one explanation for development, but marketing etc.?
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoMy guess is developer productivity slumped with the move to the modern web stack.
- robben1234 3y agoThings I managed to deliver in my first year of the first startup with Django + Ajax/Vuejs were a number of multiyear multiteam developments in my second startup (scaleup) that had dozens of microservices and Angular SPA. I'm only seeing comparable productivity on the backend these days when teams are using AWS native services.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoI'll second that, see https://www.radicalsimpli.city/ https://www.radicalsimpli.city/ ;-)
- neonate 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231210022009/https://fortune.com/2023/12/09/what-is-fueling-productivity-boom-four-reasons/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231210022009/https://fortune.c...
- frogamel 3y agoMany of the recent articles in the media about productivity are inaccurate, there is a big difference between plain English "productivity" and the economic concept of productivity. The quoted productivity #s are aggregates measured by the BLS, the only thing it measures is aggregate US output (~= to real GDP) divided by total US hours worked (# employees * avg hours/employee). The reason productivity is up so much lately is that for the past two years: - Employment (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS) has been increasing at 1-2% annualized rate (because unemployment rate/labor force participation rate hasn't been changing, so employment growth has come from population growth, which was 1-2% when current 18-30 year-olds were born) - Real GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1) has been increasing at 3-5% annualized rate The reality is there is a giant consumption boom the past few years, but minimal increase in employment since we were already at full employment, so by definition there will just be increase in aggregate productivity. It is unrelated to concepts like how hard are people working.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago>because unemployment rate/labor force participation rate hasn't been changing Unemployment in the US has been falling for some time (apart from a brief spike in 2020). https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the... You would expect this to have an effect on productivity as low value jobs are the ones most likely to be left unfilled.
- 4death4 3y agoAnother totally plausible explanation is that CPI massively underreports inflation. Productivity is inflation adjusted. If you have 10% inflation but report it as 5%, then it will appear that you’ve gained 5% productivity when you haven’t.
- aijoe5pack 3y agoAm I the only one that thinks 'Productivity' is a euphemism for more work for less pay?