Google's Internal Data Suggests Employees Feel Less Productive At Home (theinformation.com) 85
The Information reports:
Google's engineering directors are grappling with a worrisome trend: internal data that indicate productivity during the coronavirus shutdowns deteriorated among engineers, particularly newly hired ones.
One internal survey viewed by The Information found that in the three months ended in June, only 31% of the company's engineers polled felt they had been highly productive, down 8 percentage points from a record high in the March quarter. That decline and more recent data on engineers' coding output from the third quarter caused its head of engineering productivity, Michael Bachman, last week to email senior Google managers and executives, drawing attention to the data. He said the findings are "still relevant for all teams across the company," not just engineers.
Inside.com's developer newsletter supplies some context: The news comes as reports reveal Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella is tired of working from home, while Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom adds he believes remote work is, for many, a "productivity disaster" that he fears will hurt innovation.
However, these statements contradict a recent report unveiled during the September DevOpsWorld 2020 conference examining the impact of Covid-19 on software development, where many reported an increase in productivity.
One internal survey viewed by The Information found that in the three months ended in June, only 31% of the company's engineers polled felt they had been highly productive, down 8 percentage points from a record high in the March quarter. That decline and more recent data on engineers' coding output from the third quarter caused its head of engineering productivity, Michael Bachman, last week to email senior Google managers and executives, drawing attention to the data. He said the findings are "still relevant for all teams across the company," not just engineers.
Inside.com's developer newsletter supplies some context: The news comes as reports reveal Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella is tired of working from home, while Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom adds he believes remote work is, for many, a "productivity disaster" that he fears will hurt innovation.
However, these statements contradict a recent report unveiled during the September DevOpsWorld 2020 conference examining the impact of Covid-19 on software development, where many reported an increase in productivity.
No (Score:3, Insightful)
They're not less productive.
They just _feel_ they are, as even the summary clearly states.
BTW, since we're talking about our feelings, my knee hurts.
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Exactly this.
I, for one, realized I was more productive, using objective measures... that is, until the megacorporation I work for decided I'm no longer needed, after 15 years of being productive for them.
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Exactly this. I, for one, realized I was more productive, using objective measures... that is, until the megacorporation I work for decided I'm no longer needed, after 15 years of being productive for them.
Ironically enough, you were probably let go by a member of micromanagement. Have to justify their costs above yours after all.
And yeah, that's most likely the special flavor of management that ordered this report with the ever-predictable result regarding remote work.
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google != every other company that has wfh employees....
Misread that for a minute...I too, was wondering how I could achieve the rank and title of WTF employee.
Sounds pretty damn prestigious to have someone exclaim that when addressing you.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Except TFA says those employees are right, and even the other employees are less productive than before:
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Except it's not an obvious, infallible indication of lost productivity. Working outside a busy common office with interruptions may let folks carve out more maker time http://paulgraham.com/makerssc... [paulgraham.com] and a possible consequence of that is, fewer but more substantial PRs. It makes sense intuitively for those tasks that need contemplation and deep work, while in the office, the circumstances favor kanban-style solution of issues arriving on a conveyor belt. The change requests themselves may be less granular
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Well, sure, but what *is* infallible? If you manage by metrics, it's vitally important to understand the limitations of each metric you use. Ideally you have a suite of metrics with different strengths and weaknesses. Here we have a key metric that has gone south at the same time subjective perception that productivity has gone down; that's clearly a red flag.
I think everyone here understands the importance of uninterrupted work time for software developers, but it doesn't follow that working from home i
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It is an obvious indicator, because Google used it before. TFA also mentions that the number of CLs submitted was substantially lower than expected. And it's not perfect, but there are at least three reasons to think it is reliable here.
First, because good software development practice tries to define CLs in a consistent way -- change one thing or address one issue, rather than lumping things together -- CL counts tend to be comparable over time. Speculating that they became less granular isn't plausible
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The problem with KPI (Key Performance Indicators) is that they make assumptions. I could have much worse KPI's if I took the time to resolve everything I could in the day, rather than trying to solve everything as fast as possible and then having the issue reopened.
What I learned working for "big corps" in the past, is they want to look pretty to shareholders, and inflating your numbers by any means was "the game" in megacorps. So I'm sure if you go look at Google's CL's you'd find people were inflating the
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So the improvement was across the board a general reduction in fuckwadery, and those who created change for no purpose other than to create change (ie, the most useless fuckwads of all) felt that they were useless fuckwads.
Sounds about right to me.
It's their kids (Score:2)
This will be a non issue once the schools are back up and running, but that's not going to happen until late 2021 - early 2022 because it'll take that long to get the pandemic under control (without killing off 14 million people with "herd immunity").
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What herd immunity? There are now like 5 different variants of the virus and there are cases of people who have gotten it two or three times even.
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Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Productivity, meaning, how much stuff you crank out in a given period is probably up as there should be less distraction at home (depending on the home).
Innovation, on the other had, is probably way down as it is pretty hard to 'brainstorm' over Instant Messaging or Conference calls. Nothing replaces 5 experts in a room and a whiteboard.
I have been WFH for 15 years for a major corp and in the begging I used to get trips back to the mother ship for the purposes of innovation....those stopped after a couple of years, and my (notably biased) opinion is that they are less innovative. That and outsourcing jobs to cheap countries doesn't help.
Re: No (Score:1)
Innovation, on the other had, is probably way down as it is pretty hard to 'brainstorm' over Instant Messaging or Conference calls. Nothing replaces 5 experts in a room and a whiteboard.
"Innovation" doesn't exist due to groups; it exists despite it.
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Let me guess... you don't have kids. Or do, but your circumstances are such that it's difficult for you to have a number of uninterrupted blocks of time during the week. Even a half day here, half day there can be more "deep work time" than what a busy office environment and local camaraderie usually facilitates.
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This is not a good indicator though of the general principle of WFH though because what is almost certainly the problem is not that WFH is inherently less productive, but WFH when you are trapped with your kids and spouse/partner underfoot and not setup properly for all of you to being WFH. That's part of why the deals where they do one day a week are so stupid. If WFH isn't part of your ordinary work life, then it's just a monkey wrench or effectively PTO but on-call.
I've been working for a consulting fi
250 hours driving! Don't have too many children! (Score:1)
30 minutes driving each way to and from work is 1 hour every work day.
There are 50 5-day work weeks, 250 work days. That is 250 hours of driving to and from work!
250 hours of driving to and from work is 6 1/4 40-hour weeks, 6.25 weeks for which you aren't paid!
It is FAR better to work from home. You don't lose the time getting ready for work, driving to work, driving home, and changing your work clothes. No charge for fuel, less car maintenance.
Less pol
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If they were less productive, knowing if they were aware of it or not would be important data to gather. It would help inform how to fix the issue. Do they just need to be told? Do they need nannies sent to their house?
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And how do you think they'll understand the cause? Maybe by surveying their employees?
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Is that another way of saying "use prejudices as opposed to gathering data?" Or recognizing that things can be more complicated than what you can imagine over a single cup of coffee? Because there are enough people in the world Dunning-Krugering their way through life.
Re: No (Score:2)
Exactly managent is noticing that zoom meetings suck not that they paid attention to real meetings also sucked and was a time waster.
One company scheduled a massive all hands on meeting at the same time. As when we were slammed busy, hand tons of people out on the field, and then got pissed that the meeting screwed up sales and response times.
The next meeting was supposed to be different except it was the same because the same manager set the same schedule.
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Where is your proof that they are not less productive?
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Exactly. Feelings and perceptions are important, but not relevant to the bottom line in this situation. I'm not sure who these people are though -- I spend most of my time at the office trying to tune out noise and distractions around me and a lot of energy making sure that I *appear* productive. At home I can just focus on getting shit done.
Anyway, sorry to hear that your knee hurts. Hope it gets better soon.
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It's always about control. People who are at the bottom, feel they are more productive at home because they're not interrupted by pointless banter from people who come to work to socialize. This is a good thing for introverts, not so much for extroverts.
People who are at the top (eg management, supervisors, etc) feel less productive because they're now subjected to the same onerous policies forced on the people below them for productivity, which means they can't hack it by interrupting their subordinates.
Ev
It depends (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on the work and the worker. Besides, productivity is not measured by people's feelings... or at least it shouldn't be. Their feelings may be a symptom of something else caused by the "new normal". Months of reduced/shifted social activity is not going to cause issues for some folks.
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"It depends on the work and the worker. Besides, productivity is not measured by people's feelings... or at least it shouldn't be"
If the middle management doesn't yell at them for a couple of days, they feel wrong.
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It depends on only two things, are they an introvert, they like working from home or are they an extrovert, they will actually go fucking nuts working from home. The majority of people are extroverts, by far the majority, good luck with that.
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Even allowing for such a clear dichotomy or single-dimensional slide as folks throw around terms like introvert and extrovert, I'd be surprised if most folks at Google are the type that'd go effing nuts working from home. That with an organization that's expressly not remote friendly, therefore they likely receive fewer applications from folks who don't mind, or even prefer remote work, and more applications from those who prefer or expressly crave office work. (The economy of that is simple; if somebody le
"Internal Data" and "engineers' coding output". (Score:1)
That's what they seem to draw their conclusions from. Translation: our meaningless internal metrics that count raw lines of code. Which doesn't mean anything, but we'll just pretend that it does in order to draw meaningless conclusions.
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void my_secret_fun(int i) {
int j;
j = i;
}
for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++)
my_secret_fun(i);
and other useless stuff, just inserted to make corporate statisticians happy.
Innovation stems from the vending machines (Score:5, Insightful)
I can agree with it "hurting innovation". Smart ideas come from informal conversations, brainstorming and even "overhearing" colleagues' situations. Don't see this happening at home were you tend to view just your own part of the job and loose the overall perspective of things.
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This. Discussions - in office or online - are great for knowledge sharing, working through complicated, but not fundamentally hard, issues, inspiring one another and allowing for serendipity.
Permitting contemplation and focused work without the inevitable interruptions in the office is an enabler of innovation.
On-site work will come back (Score:1)
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Well, maybe Google, which, erm, has become successful on the back of the internet, including its own modest contribution to the space via modestly collaborative tools such as Google Docs, could invest in dismantling the remote / office divide, invent and dogfood technologies that increase connectedness, and in general, try to not see the internet as just a way of capturing advertisement dollars but also as a means of collaboration.
Kids? (Score:5, Interesting)
in the three months ended in June, only 31% of the company's engineers polled felt they had been highly productive, down 8 percentage points from a record high in the March quarter
April-June was approximately the time that schools were closed and kids stuck at home, as opposed to January-March when schools were open (except at the very end). Maybe 8% of workers found it harder to work simply because their kids were bugging them all the time? If so, this wouldn't translate to the long term, when kids will be in school, but work from home will still be an option.
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Great point too (besides earlier points that individual feel, or even PR count aren't direct productivity metrics).
Also, there's the novelty factor: unlike companies and their folks who've been at it when remote working was cool (rather than par for the course as now) the Google organization, Google folks, by and large, are inexperienced in remote work.
It is expected that if an entity has no practice in X, but they start doing X, they won't be immediately great in X, duh :-)
Deterioriated amongst newly hired? (Score:3)
When someone is newly hired, how do you even define deteriorated productivity? Compared to their last job? Compared to their first week that was before the lockdown? This is really meaningless.
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Indeed. Besides, companies who routinely hire for, or are organized toward distributed work already know that both onboarding and hiring less senior folks are two areas that need particular focus. What are the odds that Google, a laggard in this space, got it right on first attempt (or more likely, lack thereof)?
Causation vs Correlation (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's assume that _feeling_ less productive translates into _being_ less productive --
Is that due to working from home, or due to other conditions of our current situation?
Many of us are worrying about a deadly disease and how it relates to us, our families, and friends.
Many have children with disrupted routines that frequently involve being home at times when they might be out with others... ...or perhaps it's worry over members of our national leadership actively attempting to damage and destroy the places we live?
Hmm...
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Indeed, maybe correlation is not causation...
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or perhaps it's worry over members of our national leadership actively attempting to damage and destroy the places we live
You mean the riots, and the leadership who encourages and tolerates them? Yeah, that is worrisome.
I'm less productive... (Score:3)
Mostly because it's hard to fit a ship in my living room.
It depends (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it depends.
If your daily job is mostly writing code and solving complex algorithmic problems and you don't have kids to constantly disturb you, then working from home will most likely make you a lot more productive than a busy office.
On the other hand, if your job is about sitting in meetings all day long then, of course, you can't be as productive working over Zoom and what not than meeting with people in person. Then there is also feeling of some managers that unless they can watch what their underlings are doing over their shoulder, they can't be sure they are working and not wasting their time.
The same if you have kids at home - trying to do anything, whether programming or a meeting, while being constantly pestered by one's offspring is almost impossible.
Predicate on outcome, measure by output (Score:2)
That old chestnut. So nice to see Google practice what they preach.
Bollocks. (Score:4, Funny)
Which, to be fair, is a decent measure of productivity since I work for a testicular cancer clinic.
Ridiculous (Score:2)
First they push everyone out then they come to this conclusion? Is it anosognosia?
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They didn't 'push everybody out'. State mandates put them in a position of either shutting down or sending employees home to work. In the meantime, companies (smart ones) have been keeping an eye on productivity and morale. This is their conclusion.
I pity the poor companies that just got underway or finished a program of reorganizing work spaces from individual offices to open plans. They would have been better off keeping the walls.
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If they were so smart then they would have foreseen this already, probably even invested in vaccine-patents too.
I agree with the assesment (mostly) (Score:3, Informative)
When I came out of college and entered the software engineering realm I was lucky enough to be placed with a senor engineer who's assignment was his job plus keep me on track/answer stupid beginner questions. That in person relationship of mentoring was huge. I turned around and did the same for others.
I've worked remotely and with a remote workforce for years, even managed some teams. What I found from the right out of college engineers is they still needed that interaction, and preferably in person.
1. A mentor could see them going off the rails and help them out. This is harder in a W@H environment.
2. The discipline of getting up and working hard is important in the early years. It teaches discipline and a habit of working hard and I mean productive work (heads down coding, figuring out issues, debugging a coding problem). Being in the office potentially gives them that training, plus the interaction with wise engineers to realize HOURS != PRODUCTION and in fact too many hours and your production goes down
3. Just being the office isn't a solution. It is critical they are teamed up with a mentor, and I mean critical.
I have seen the remote and overloaded world totally decimate that type of interaction and training. It isn't doing the young/new to the field a favor.
Even as a senior software engineer when I first enter a new company environment I have to learn the ins and outs of their culture. How to file the necessary paperwork. Again, being able to walk over and say, "hey how do I do this here" saves a huge amount of time. But after the initial adaptation, I find working from home doesn't make any difference at all. In fact, I'm willing to put a little more time in because of the short commute
And the survey says,,,, (Score:2)
The results of Google's later internal surveys seem to painting a different picture..
From the article, about 1/2 way down.
"After an initial drop, Google’s company-wide surveys have found sentiment on productivity rebounded and is now higher among its general staff than pre-coronavirus levels, Katie Hutchison, a Google spokeswoman, told The Information. She also referenced a September survey that found productivity sentiment among engineers was higher than it was for the same period the year prior"
People are bad at measuring output (Score:2)
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Extroverts (Score:3)
This looks like another case of extroverted managers making decisions for introverts.
Introverts should be at least equally represented on management teams.
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Introverts should be at least equally represented on management teams.
Uh, they are.
You just never hear about them. They sit quietly behind the scenes being effective functional working technical managers.
Introverts, remember?
The ones you never hear shut-the-fuck-up are the narcissistic extrovert underbosslings who represent a layer of micromanagement that is desperately trying to justify themselves in a world of ever-sharpening-pencils.
Depends on personality and company (Score:2)
I live in an outer suburb of NYC, just barely within sane commuting distance. Pre-COVID, there would have been no way that even the salary differential would allow me to take more interesting jobs that NYC companies offer...we're talking a solid 3 hours a day of just train/subway commuting. While I was sitting home working for my less-interesting local employer, I realized that maybe this was less of a blocker now and started looking. I'm starting a new job with an "in the city" employer next month. Of cour
The homejob (Score:1)
I would prefer a blend (Score:2)
When Covid is over, I think my ideal would be 3 days in office, two at home. That gives me time to focus uninterrupted and still gives face to face time for things that are better done in person. Itâ(TM)s for another discussion, but the open office concept is terrible.
System 1 thinking at work (Score:2)
I suspect a lot of the problem is that home workers lack the incremental feedback to which they are accustomed. Jobs are broken up into larger chunks between feedback sessions, which makes it seem like fewer things are done each day. Those annoying "over-the-shoulder" check-ins throughout the day serve a purpose that can be positive for certain personality types that thrive in a high-touch environment.
Er, wow! (Score:2)
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Are you telling me that being less productive during a global pandemic is unusual?!!
Those three months polled were not 'working from home', they were trying to keep the lights on during an evacuation.
That's a major evacuation. They should see their doctor.
some are missing meetings:) (Score:2)
Perception of productivity doesn't mean anything (Score:1)
Don't Want To Die (Score:2)
Pointy haired manager? (Score:1)
Everyone I know says overwhelmingly they're FAR more productive at home. If for no other reason than not going to (useless) meetings.
Technology is hurting us that way too. Last gig I had they were doing Agile/SAFE. So they found a way to have us all skype a meeting and waste I'd say 3-4 hours every day going over BS about how we're doing. Glad we weren't in an office.
I have a feeling this is a pointy haired boss saying - we need to be in the office.
Why do the results have to be uniform? (Score:2)
The length of the home office stint likely has an effect too. The first couple months might be of increased productivity with a decline after.
We're talking about human beings here, working in teams, with complex dynamics. I would be surprised if results were uniform.
I've been locked down since march (in Argentina BTW). I'm tired of working from home. I've been plenty productive, but I don't
What do the teams who stayed in-office say? (Score:2)
I'm super tired of being stuck at home - and I'm retired. I have troubles imagining any set of daily activity I was devoted to which wasn't affected by the coronavirus. Maybe if I spent my days doing crossword puzzles? But I'm not that kind of retired, I'm more of a cycling and hiking and camping and traveling and taking community-ed classes type of retired, and all of that is changed in various ways. So there's literally no chance that I'd say anything more positive than "Well, it beats being sick, I g