Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar (that you partially define along with your employer). Caring about maximizing productivity is the goal of your employer. But you have some leverage in this job market so it's not like they can squeeze you dry. Remote only helps the employee side of that adversarial relationship.
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.
I like showing up at work to work together with my co-workers. If you don't then maybe you should get a new job where you like the people you work with.
Am I really not looking forward to the new remote work future. Maybe someone will come up with a way to restore the socializing I got from work. I don't just want to hang out with friends. I want to work together with people on a common goal, and by "work together" I mean I want to do this in the same space. Just like eating lunch on zoom or going to a virtual bar via facetime is not as good as actually siting at the same table with friends neither is remote work as fulfilling "for me" as actually being in the same space as my co-workers. But then again I like my co-workers and I like the things we are building together.
I don't think this is guaranteed to happen. Another possible outcome is that tech salaries will pin to the lowest common denominator, such that employers will "outsource" much of their engineering work to engineers that live in low cost-of-living markets.
So just as always, you have a choice, what's worth more to you? Money, or free time? And pick your job accordingly.
They paid poorly precisely because of the relative lack of opportunity for software in the region at the time. That meant anyone who’s livelihood was in software had little recourse other than to move. That was the option I took, but others can’t for a number of reasons.
Just because you're working together in a circumstance that benefits the two parties doesn't mean each party is not also working against each other to some degree to better optimize their self-interests.
An employer may need an employee to create something and by creating and selling that thing, an employer and employee may both get a cut and benefit. None of that prevents the employer or employee from attempting to get a larger cut or do less work (invest less time) to receive their cut. Extremes to either side cause the relationship to collapse but there's definitely wiggle room in the margins beyond a 50/50 split.
I've yet to meet a single employer that doesn't try to optimize on labor costs in that relationship through some component or another, directly or indirectly.
Which is also true. At the same time, risk is highly relative which is why this situation is feasible at all. What's risky for you to do as an individual is not of the same order of magnitude of relative risk when you consider scaling of available resources.
Example, Alphabet, Amazon, or Company Y decide to invest $1 million in a new SaaS 'X' effort with some monthly fee in an attempt to build a successful product/service. These companies have arrays of pre-existing successful products/services they've built (typically diversified) that generate stable profits. Relative to that sort of expected profit, SaaS 'X' is a drop in the bucket. If 'X' fails, it's the same absolute monetary loss ($1 million) but the relative risk of losing $1 million isn't significant to any of these businesses, it's small relative to their total resource pool of disposable assets. Loss recovery will also take significantly less time.
On the other hand, if I as an individual go through the effort to form an LLC, develop SaaS 'X' myself and fail, $1 million is nothing to scoff at. Even if you're in the higher income scales of our industry and making $300-500k+/yr for labor, you're looking at ~3-4 years or so of potential losses and values that are probably near or a bit more than your total personal assets, at the very least I'd say 10%. If you start an LLC and get a loan or have some investor drop money on you, $1 million is still likely going to be a lot relative to your loan. It's highly likely that if 'X' fails your business will fail. There's high relative risk here (there are some mitigations strategies from your personal assets but it's still significant). You're probably going to face noticeable financial hardship or have to revert back to the labor market due to business small failure rates.
Risk is mitigated through scale, snowballed growth, and diversification (amongst other strategies) in our economic system through initial successes that often occur either through true innovation/market creation/penetration and/or sheer luck.
My personal take on things is that if you don’t recognize the adversarial part of the employer/employee relationship, then you will suffer for it. It’s more healthy to recognize where parties have competing interests, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them.
I’d also say that the people who can ignore the adversarial aspects of employment can only do so because of a fair bit of privilege. For example, people will throw around the saying here that “HR is an advocate for the company, not the employee,” but many of us will never really have to deal with HR in a way where it really matters.
I'm not sure I'd agree. When a company loses an employee it's an inconvenience but when an employee loses their job it's often devastating.
The market rewards them for this. Is the market wrong, or your thesis?
Your employer needs employees, not specific employees.
And this change isn't going to improve employee leverage, it's going to decrease it substantially when all companies develop processes to have a significantly higher pool of candidates to hire from. Long-term employees will look at having a company-provided office with a good work environment as a luxury.
This is the path to mediocrity and leaving tons of money on the table in much of the tech industry.
I've been able to be well above mediocre in west coast tech for years now with this strategy /shrug For FAANG, startups, and other BigCos.
FYI, the bar can be the bar needed to get a promotion & bump your pay grade. It can also be to keep your current job & stay the course. And it can change over time strategically.
Unless your side hustle brings in $300k+ a year, you’re better off becoming critical at the main job because it becomes very lucrative.
Now, WFH I'm free to set my own schedule. Sometimes I do my best work later in the evening, something that I never had time or energy to do while following the "9-5" schedule.
I don't miss the socialization much, probably because of the roll my family fulfills. The most important difference now is that I have a lot more patience with my family, because I don't feel the constant stress of my old commute and schedule.
I was super productive in the first month of WFH, but that spike is going away, and I think a large part of it is meeting fatigue. The projects we are working on require coordinating with lots of devs within our team and then devs and PMs on other teams. That means lots of meetings here and there to make sure we're all on the same page.
There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).
My team does have lunches together remotely, but having to be tied to the computer the whole day, I often want to drop out of those and just be outside in the sun.
But to your point about burnout, I find that that's the other extreme as well. In those afternoons or days that I don't have meetings, there's a sense that, okay, I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard. While at the office, you'd have occasionally breaks and conversations in the hall when you were getting up for coffee and you could see people's rhythms. At home, I don't see that, so my natural, irrational belief is everyone must be working hard, so I should too.
But FB people ops (or beyond) aren't stupid and hopefully they can come up with ways to intentionally replace this. Won't be the same but something is needed and will be better than nothing or ad-hoc.
This sounds like a normal day in the office for me pre-lockdown :/
The feeling of "I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard" can also be pretty hard to shake. Especially if most people are heads-down and there's no chatter on Slack or email or anything going on.
1. Companies have to invest in work from home practices and they have just started to do that. Using zoom and creating more meetings to replace in person experiences is not sufficient.
2. People have in effect just brought work into their home, into a house with no child care and generally no prepared work spaces
So please don't use this period as a reference for what WFH looks like when an organization is dedicated to doing it.
So in some ways, the current situation is actually an improvement over a more typical split environment.
Ask me to WFH in a shared room in a tiny SiValley apartment with construction, gardeners and the neighbors music blasting randomly and I will show you how to waste $250k per year.
We are moving to a house next month with a separate office space on the other side of a 2 car garage from the main house. I am beyond excited.
When I am repairing my car/bike, he comes with his bike (small plastic one) and gets under it and starts repairing act.
And he does it for long as I am repairing mine.
It's interesting that I don't live with him but he is copying my action but when I asked his mom if he helps with housework as he probably sees her doing a lot of housework, she said no.
I've no idea why getting under a bike is more appealing to him than doing stuff like cleaning with a mop and bucket.
kicks the dirt a bit
We call it iPad time.
I’m on my 10th year of wfh with just a handful of days per year in the office and I notice how each time I’m in the office I realize I actually like that guy who is professionaly the most annoying one. This is extremely important for an organization to work. I do it too little and while I wouldn’t want to go 100% to the office I realize I’m not doing it enough.
We are 90% remote. Most remote employees are in the same area though, so sometimes they commute to the office for weekly meetings or just to hang out and work together.
I don’t live in the same country so I’m 100% remote. However, I still travel to the office ( when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic going on ) a few times a year.
I think giving people the option to work in the office when they want to is the best solution. Keep meetings on skype/jitsi, whatever, but give people the option to attend in person. More people will come than you might think.
I manage four small development teams and the one metric I track is velocity or velocity per developer (VPD). If you're familiar with scrum, you probably have a sense of what this means. (Note: this data is tracked in an open spreadsheet and not used to reward or punish but rather to adjust and adapt.)
Anyway, we went full-time remote from in-office 9-10 weeks ago. We did have some experience being partially remote (team members in different offices) before this. A comparison of avg VPD for last 3 sprints in-office (WFO) vs last 3 sprints (WFH):
Team | WFO | WFH
1 | 8.6 | 7.8
2 | 9.2 | 7.6
3 | 8.1 | 7.6
4 | 7.5 | 7.7
My impression is that productivity has held more or less steady and VPD will eventually not be too different from where it was.
I've also talked about this individually with members of my team. The consensus seems to be leaning toward a flexible mixture of WFH and WFO. That's the future I'd like to see.
Suffocating Agile, as is the standard these days, is about pushing away risky, but really valuable tasks, in favor of fine grained, easily estimated and understandable tasks that are only of minor importance but "feel" like progress. They are more amenable to Bad Agile, and so are the tasks that get selected increasingly in the long run.
WFH is far, far better at deep work, which is much more important to the long term value of a company.
Schools are closed.
"Velocity is the sum of the estimates of the stories that were completed in an iteration. If the programmers estimate perfectly, it's simply a measure of the number of hours that the programmers worked, minus interruptions. The number is often confused by estimates that aren't 100% accurate. Velocity measures a strange combination of estimate accuracy and hours worked. It's a great planning tool, but as a metric, it has serious flaws."
https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Productivity-Metric.html
do you have any other recommendation?
The article you've provided continues to keep saying story points are good things.
I don't know how we've found something contrary to what I've asked, yet.
* multipliers, like infrastructure work or pipeline improvements?
* fixing of technical debt that may have no immediate benefit?
* projects of uncertain monetary value?
* projects with great short term value but so much technical debt that they crumble the company a few years later?
* moonshots that may revolutionize the company?
How would organizations like the entirety of Microsoft Research where some guy got to play with coloring problems for a long time and that just so happened to end up requiring him to solve a subset of the halting problem, which just so happened to have benefit in driver validation? (It’s going to take me a looong time to find that source somewhere on the internet.)
> Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.
They were responding to someone that was using their average story point completion rate to track their productivity.
This person seems to be talking about what sorts of work to work on - the kind that makes the company money.
If it's already been predicted or measured that a certain project is going to earn the company money, then you need to know how long it's going to take to complete that project, which means either estimating it as a whole, or breaking the project into parts and estimating each part.
Assuming two projects of similar mathematical proportionality of size and value, you can then estimate velocity based on how much projected time it's going to take to complete each step of each project, as estimated by story points or similar.
In this way, story points can still be a meaningful metric that you can estimate velocity on.
In short, the discussion is on two separate things and their initial premise of velocity being meaningless is not correct.
Velocity is a great prediction tool. Given a total estimate, it can tell you approximately how many weeks it will take to be done. It's a unit conversion factor: velocity = 25 points / week, therefore 100 points = 4 weeks.
Productivity is defined as output / input. Effort and time are both "input." Velocity is a way of converting from points (effort) to weeks (time). To measure productivity, you still need to define "output."
OP said, "On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them."
But OP didn't define "output," so they weren't measuring productivity. They just showed that their effort --> time unit conversion factor had changed. Given that there's any number of possible reasons for this—changes in hours worked, changes in overhead, changes in estimating technique, changes in estimate accuracy—the numbers probably aren't meaningful.
They're measuring how much work they're getting done based around approximate predicted complexity / work amount using story points and then using that to map overall work output and charting it from between non-WFH and WFH. If the projects they're working on have tended to remain of similar complexity with people that tend to be consistent, then this seems like a perfectly fine metric for exactly what they're trying to discuss: the relative output from WFH and non-WFH.
A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of effort for completing requirements.
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-poi...
It is generally recommend you not include time as a component of that unit. For our teams, we kinda do. (Basically, for us, story point = time + uncertainty + complexity.) So there is a common standard. But with scrum you're supposed to size stories relative to other (previous) stories and I feel it's ok for the standard measure of a story point to drift apart between teams as long as its internally consistent to the team.
So maybe there's some kind of leveling force at work. But probably not.
Also, ideally, you should be able to meet your colleagues once in a while to discuss important matters and keep a human connection. But surprisingly lots of trust and friendship can be maintained at distance.
Take time to refresh, slow down during the day and try to maintain social contact despite the lockdown (whatever your local conditions are, you might have to use remote methods of course).
I've been able to work well those last two months but can't wait to hug all my colleagues - miss them as well.
The former are generally pro working from home while the latter feel more swamped and are always talking about how busy they are now.
My guess is that for the first group it's pretty much business as usual, while the second (not generally producing visible output) feels that meetings are the only signal to indicate work being done. And as a result # of meetings in their area has gone up dramatically.
Would love to hear a counter from managers, perhaps I'm way off the mark.
More that as we transition to remote, there is a higher internal desire to signal worth to offset not being in the office. Which on the surface is easily accomplished by adding meetings to your calendar.
Why has this happened? My estimation is that it isn't "because I'm a manager" or "because I'm trying to create artificial face time to indicate my value", but because the broader organization hasn't matured enough culturally to know how to handle itself when everybody is WFH. Examples of things that haven't happened yet:
1) Top down declaration of any core hours, to reduce need for early morning and evening meetings 2) Adjustment of business objectives 3) Formal recognition that there is inequity across sub-populations when it comes to WFH effectiveness/capability (type of work, family situation, living situation, infrastructure access, maturity, mental state, ...).
The perception most within the org seem to have is that, while we pressed pause on some activities (proactive sales outreach, for example), we are accelerating others, and this is coming without much regard for human experience.
Imho, there's also a difference between normal WFH -- as a previous commenter noted -- and this cv-forced WFH. I think there's real fear, that well-founded, from workers who know they can't be 100% productive right now, but don't know if that fact will be adequately recognized by their employer or have clarity around how it will impact future performance ratings, compensation and promotion decisions. As a result, many folks are struggling with balance because they feel obligate to structure their lives in an unbalanced way.
Producing the results managers achieve over videoconference meetings takes more meetings (nothing as hoc now) and is physically tiring. Maybe that is what managers in your circle have been talking about.
Now that I work from home, I've more time at my hand so I am working on my hobbies which make me more productive at my work.
Zoom/Phone don't quite replicate that experience - they require focused attention. In person, your attention can "wander" while you are still focused on the conversation. Look how many people maintain eye contact in a cafe while having a conversation. Not many right? But do the same thing on Zoom/Skype/$VideoChat. "Hey, are you paying attention?" When really, wandering eyes are indicative (usually) of deep thought.
I have a heuristic when synchronous communication (phone, video chat) is necessary: When something is:
a) complex, or b) has a significant likelihood of misunderstanding (which is just a more specific version of (a).
Actual face to face... that's got to be for things that are socially critical. Breakups. Hard messages to people who are close. First meetings with the biggest client of your life. Important deals, if they take more than "Happy? Yep." Etc. Stuff where the physical impression makes or breaks the experience.
One executive I spoke to put it like this (paraphrased): "the introverts are loving it and the extroverts hate it. Productivity-wise its neutral to positive, but emotionally a lot of our folks are struggling without work so we're still committed to reopening offices when it's safe to do so."
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc
These are the exact reasons WFH is more productive IMO. Less people coming up to your desk talking nonsense distracting you.
I run a completely distributed company and no one in their right mind would argue that a completely distributed company or even a partially work from home company
can be as good as the same people working TOGETHER in one office
The bonds are much stronger
The interaction is much better
Two superstars together are 10 times better than separately
However, when you do remote, it's only 5 times better
At minimum, it is 50% worse to have a distributed company than have a real same office, same location company
What really makes people say 'working from home is just as good' is a combination of
1) liking it for other reasons (more time with family, less pressure) and rationalizing
2) being able to cut out time wasting things (which they could anyways cut out if they were better at saying no to time wasting stuff
3) not ever having done it for a long time and seeing the long term implications
There is a very good reason that very few companies have become very big and very successful while being distributed companies