[HN Gopher] Work from Home and Productivity
___________________________________________________________________
Work from Home and Productivity
Author : Dowwie
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-05-14 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bfi.uchicago.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (bfi.uchicago.edu)
| 0xCAP wrote:
| Being able to use my own toilet gave me a 400% performance boost
| tbh.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!
|
| A useful natural experiment is when something changes in a way
| that can only (or at least almost entirely) affect your outcome
| by way of the cause you're interested in. In the cause and effect
| chain of A -> B -> C, if A affects B, but not C, then you can
| exploit wild things in A to learn about how B affects C. But if A
| affects C outside of B, you can't tell the effects apart.
|
| COVID does not constitute a natural experiment!
|
| It's a mantra that apparently needs repeating. The pandemic
| changed work from home. Work from home presumable changes
| productivity. The pandemic _also_ changes productivity, so you
| can 't tell where the pandemic-driven productivity changes are
| from more granularly. Learning anything that generalizes requires
| tremendous care.
| ineptech wrote:
| Agreed! The elephants in the room for me are the self-reported
| hours (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time
| spent changing laundry and running errands that got classified
| as work time) and the obvious confounder of children being at
| home rather than in school.
| majormajor wrote:
| > (Did "hours worked" really increase, or was that time spent
| changing laundry and running errands that got classified as
| work time)
|
| Let's keep in mind here too that "hours between commute
| to/from office" != "hours working." Coffee shop runs,
| lunches, snack breaks, chatting, walking around...
| munk-a wrote:
| It's really unfortunate that modern productivity metrics
| try and maximize things like butt-in-chair hours and time
| spent actively typing. I work in a rather creative part of
| CS and those coffee runs and walks are pretty productively
| spent time for me.
|
| One of my issues early on into the pandemic is that I was
| fearful of taking walks and my productivity actually
| dropped as my physical exercise decreased. When I realized
| this and started emphasizing active movement while working
| (dancing to techno) and taking walks to get in bursts of
| fresh air I found that things more than reversed.
|
| I would note that I have to deal with ADD and physical
| activity has a long history of positive impacts on folks
| with such - so that advice might not go for everyone.
| tdeck wrote:
| Keep in mind also that this is a consulting company, where
| people are always encouraged to report more hours in order to
| bill the client.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's kind of bizarre - I've worked in a couple of
| consulting gigs now and the hours have always been tightly
| reigned in - the company wanted all the hours for sure, but
| they wanted you producing things constantly, just throwing
| more hours at something and going over estimates was a way
| to get yourself in trouble quick.
| akiselev wrote:
| You're talking about the interface between the worker and
| the employer, the GP is talking about the interface
| between employer and client. The employer doesn't want
| the worker slacking off but that doesn't mean that they
| won't create situations that result in more billable
| work, such as by taking an inefficient path under the
| cover of intangible factors.
|
| The irony is optimizing for productivity in one while
| optimizing for billing in the other.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think that doing household chores and errands for supplies
| SHOULD count a work time if you are working from home.
|
| If you are WFH, then you are not only doing your main job,
| but you are also working in the facilities department. If you
| go to the office, there are people who clean the office, take
| out the garbage, maintain equipment, clean the bathroom, etc.
|
| At home you have to do all of that.
| munk-a wrote:
| You make a decent argument but... society doesn't judge
| that commute times or medical appointments should
| necessarily be reimbursed, so I think that there isn't
| really a "sane baseline" to compare against in non-covid
| times.
|
| There's also the very real question of division of usage -
| most of us are likely working in spaces that intersect
| heavily with our private spaces (since we didn't move to
| our current residences with having a dedicated home office
| in mind) and that creates a pretty complex process to
| actually assign responsibility - it shouldn't be 100% in
| either direction, but it's hard to figure out how much of
| that time was legitimately caused by you working from home.
| pjungwir wrote:
| That seems like a good point. I've worked from home for 15
| years, and my productivity (and billable hours) took a big hit
| last spring, just from the distraction of trying to learn what
| I could and be prepared. Subjectively I'd say my focus suffered
| as well. I imagine businesses have lost productivity in all
| kinds of ways the last ~15 months.
| kurttheviking wrote:
| I need to read the article but your comment speaks to exactly
| the analysis I'd like to see: what was the productivity
| change among those with a stable WFH situation prior to COVID
| vs. during COVID, and how does that correlate with family
| status.
|
| Personally, the biggest change for me in COVID WFH was not
| the remote meetings -- I already had plenty of those -- but
| it was the introduction of a second job: part-time
| Kindergarten teacher.
| addicted wrote:
| That's not what is meant by a natural experiment.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
| jfengel wrote:
| That's true, but it's a pretty common interpretation of the
| term "natural experiment".
|
| Few, if any, "natural experiments" are actually experiments in
| a rigorous sense. But they are a thing that happens: you have
| an uncontrolled happenstance that allows you to infer, but not
| prove, something you want to learn more about.
|
| When the surface meaning of a term has no referents, it will
| often be co-opted to refer to something people need a term for
| (assuming it's compact and convenient). Another example that
| comes to mind is "homophobia", which doesn't refer to actual
| "fear of homosexuals" but rather to a dislike for them -- a
| thing which is very common but doesn't have a convenient, short
| expression. (The term actually comes from being the opposite of
| "homophilia", a reasonably straightforward but outdated term
| for homosexuality.)
|
| So it's true that we don't really have a good control and will
| have difficulty separating out real causes and effects. But a
| thing definitely happened and we can definitely try to learn
| something from it -- a notion that happens often enough to
| merit a name. If you've got a better one we can try to make it
| catch on.
| andersource wrote:
| You're right, but then giving the title "Work from Home &
| Productivity" is misleading, giving the (IMO false)
| impression that results are generalizable for WFH beyond
| COVID. And there are some pretty strong claims:
|
| > Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%
|
| > Employees also spent less time networking, and received
| less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors
|
| > Employees with children living at home increased hours
| worked more than those without children at home, and suffered
| a bigger decline in productivity than those without children
|
| I would say these results have more to do with COVID effects
| and forced, sudden WFH than inherent characteristics of WFH.
| ghaff wrote:
| > Employees also spent less time networking, and received
| less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors
|
| And, in normal times, remote workers often have/should have
| off-sites/on-sites, in-person team meetings, etc. And I
| haven't actually had fewer 1:1's. Probably more because I
| haven't canceled as many due to travel. (Which isn't
| necessarily a positive thing but still.)
| jfengel wrote:
| Very true. It does help that the full title has a colon
| followed by "Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT
| Professionals". That word "evidence" does help limit the
| expectations for how much we can generalize.
| andersource wrote:
| True. But then why not explicitly state that this
| evidence is from COVID? That would immediately allow
| people to calibrate their expectations. In relation to
| GP, COVID is the "natural experiment" here, _not_ WFH.
| batterseapower wrote:
| This is an associative study and thus can't really tell us
| anything about the causal impact of working from home.
|
| A recent properly-conducted randomized controlled trial found
| that WFH improves productivity:
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w18871
| justAnIdea wrote:
| Obvious. Logical. Especially with kids at home. But many don't
| want to admit it.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| I don't see they have considered , daycares being closed, kids at
| home, remote schooling, no where to go, mental agony ,
| loneliness, overworked, many new to remote work culture, non-
| remote friendly processes etc. Analyzing WFH when a pandemic is
| ongoing is not helping anyone and it is doing no good.
| xhrpost wrote:
| A lot of comments here saying that this is a flawed study because
| we don't know how the pandemic may have impacted a statistical
| decline in productivity. I must ask, why is this not a concern
| when someone anecdotally or statistically shows an increase in
| productivity from Covid WFH? The response is instead something
| like "we've known it all along! WFH is better!".
| tayo42 wrote:
| Probably just intuition, wfh was more productive despite a
| global pandemic. Intuitively covid is a disruption that would
| decrease in productivity like other distractions
| tqi wrote:
| Confirmation bias.
|
| Honestly, IMO most of economics "research" is just a random
| assortment of bullshit viewed through a lens of confirmation
| bias. Results don't match your priors? Make adjustments to your
| model assumptions until it does. Disagree with a result? Point
| out at all the ways in which those assumptions are imperfect.
| Results match your priors? LGTM.
| andersource wrote:
| For me personally, the reason is that I fully expect the
| pandemic to negatively impact productivity in ways completely
| unrelated to WFH (children in home instead of school, stress,
| lack of preparedness to proper WFH, etc.). In contrast, I find
| it difficult to think of pandemic-related but not WFH-related
| aspects that I expect to _improve_ productivity. I 'd be happy
| to be convinced otherwise.
| theleftfielder wrote:
| I think the biggest one is that most people's social lives
| also dried up during the pandemic. You weren't finishing up
| WFH and then rushing out to get dinner and see a movie with
| friends. You weren't traveling or taking vacation. I've had a
| lot of conversations with people on my team over the last
| year that were some version of:
|
| Them: "I finished this over the weekend."
|
| Me: "That's great, but you're to be clear you're not expected
| to do that. You should feel free to take weekends off to
| recharge!"
|
| Them: "Yeah but what else am I going to do right now?"
|
| If there hadn't been a pandemic, they would've been doing all
| of these other things and then more likely to cut back on
| work when the end of work hours roll around.
| Havoc wrote:
| A big surprise to me was the impact on having "real talk"
| discussions with my boss.
|
| I joined during covid and obviously working at home I was used to
| everything being truly 1:1 just between us. (I'm blessed with a
| great boss)
|
| The few back at office days rattled me a bit in terms of "who is
| listening/judging" in open plan.
|
| I've spent years in open plan so that aspect isn't new...but
| somehow the covid contrast rattled me
| Huiokko wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean.
|
| I book 1:1 with my manager and it was always in a meeting room.
|
| Is it common for you to have 1:1 in your cubicle?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Pre-covid, I only ever had manager 1:1s in a meeting room, or
| much more commonly, walking around the campus. Very
| occasionally a 1:1 in a deserted corner of a cafeteria during
| non-meal hours.
|
| A manager 1:1 in a nonprivate space sounds awful.
| hvocode wrote:
| It's a shame the WFH experiment is blended with the pandemic.
| It's hard to decouple the "effectiveness of WFH" from the
| "pervasive impact of a global pandemic on all aspects of daily
| life". I think a lot of people got a negative taste for WFH for
| reasons that are less WFH and more pandemic.
| rustybelt wrote:
| Having three kids at home doing remote schooling is such a huge
| confounding factor. Anecdotally, my WFH productivity (or at
| least my uninterrupted work time tracked via RescueTime) seems
| to have improved since my older two went back to in-person
| school this quarter.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Yeah, that's tough, and the younger ones can't do very much
| of it by themselves without help.
|
| Read the instructions here to learn how to read >
| moshmosh wrote:
| Not only that, but even if one had someone else to watch the
| kids during that time, one couldn't go work from a coffee
| shop or whatever like one normally might, for a change of
| scenery or to avoid at-home distractions.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Lockdowns specifically, not just the pandemic.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I'd question how conclusions are being drawn here. I think the
| key takeaway is that output did not change.
|
| The authors then go on to say that since hours worked increased,
| productivity decreased. But how do we define what an "hour
| worked" really means? I know that I definitely spend more time
| "working" during WFH in the sense that I am either being
| responsive to colleagues or actively working on my own work.
| However during that time I am also doing way more household tasks
| than I would be working in an office.
|
| You may call that a loss of productivity, but I'd call it an
| increase in flexibility, freedom, and job satisfaction. And to
| reiterate, output stayed the same, so what's the problem?
| discardable_dan wrote:
| Honestly, I think the study sort of damns itself with this
| line:
|
| > Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased,
| but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
|
| You can easily translate this as:
|
| > Without workers in the office, middle management was left to
| spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their
| workers from spending their time on work tasks.
|
| If that is true, let's consider the facts:
|
| 1. Workers worked longer hours. 2. Workers spent more time in
| meetings than before. 3. Workers achieved roughly the same
| output.
|
| Now, if we stare at these three things really hard, I think the
| conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the
| supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does,
| and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.
| jrcii2 wrote:
| That's an interesting twist. I like the positive aspect of it
| given I've mostly felt guilty for being able to flexibly take
| on more household tasks while taking breaks from work.
|
| I do think things would trend even more positively had this not
| been a pandemic. Folks would have more flexibility in work
| location and could "pick their spots" better in the sense that
| they'd have more control over their environment and could
| tailor it to specific tasks.
| taylodl wrote:
| I'm with you. I mix personal tasks and work tasks throughout
| the day. My work output is the same or better, but the stuff
| I'm getting done around the house - SKYROCKET! My quality of
| life has improved dramatically.
| js8 wrote:
| I think it is, frankly, irrelevant. Companies need to understand
| that their employees are adults, and should be able to pick
| whichever way of working is comfortable for them. If that
| decreases productivity, they should get less in compensation.
|
| I doubt it will change, though, unless employees start to
| organize in unions and demand to be treated in less patronizing
| way.
| ultrastable wrote:
| "Sapience time measurement is sophisticated and designed to be
| resilient to simple manipulatio nattempts. Merely keeping the
| computer on for longer or watching videos instead of working does
| not increase Input. Rather, it would require having the relevant
| work software as the active window,and giving continuous user
| input (via mouse, keyboard)."
|
| doesn't sound that sophisticated to me lol. in any case their
| claim that their output measure (completed tasks) is "rigorous
| and objective" is questionable to put it mildly: "The company
| uses a normalized measure of output to make different jobs and
| roles comparable.For example, for a programmer the output measure
| might be programming tasks completed divided by tasks assigned,
| times 100. For other roles, Output might be the number of reviews
| (e.g., of code) completed relative to the monthly target, or the
| number of reports delivered relative to the target.". no mention
| made of the relative effort required for each programming task,
| or the quality of reports delivered - not to mention no
| assessment of whether those targets accurately measure anything
| that's beneficial to the company.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| lol, this would result in engineering teams generating
| progressively smaller scoped tickets to maximize tasks and
| reviews completed. Update Text For Button --
| started 5/10, completed 5/11 Update Color Of Button
| -- started 5/11, completed 5/12 Update Margins Of
| Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13 Update Border
| Radius Of Button -- started 5/13
| heisenbit wrote:
| > but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.
|
| How can that happen - kids aside? The best part of WFH
| uninterrupted time for the more complicated tasks. We used to
| call with our phones and felt obliged to pick up. Now we call via
| Teams and you can simply tune out or be in a non-interruptible
| state and people are less tempted to call when I'm trying to
| focus.
| dominotw wrote:
| JP morgan is forcing me to come into office, i am still waiting
| for my second dose.
|
| Jamie is forcing ppl to come into work and making up stupid
| anecdotes about how ppl are unproductive at home. Him being "fed
| up" means i have to risk my life. [1]
|
| I don't understand how he is getting away with this.
|
| 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/jamie-dimon-fed-up-with-
| zoom...
| macd wrote:
| > (They) would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based
| employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational
| schedule.
|
| > Employee rotations at JPMorgan will be subject to a 50%
| occupancy cap until U.S. authorities revise their social-
| distancing guidelines, according to Tuesday's memo. The bank
| advised workers that "with this time frame in mind you should
| start making any needed arrangements to help with your
| successful return."
|
| Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to come
| in every day starting this week, whether you're vaccinated or
| not?
|
| 1.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/jpmorgan-...
| dominotw wrote:
| > Why are you trying to make it seem like they told you to
| come in every day starting this week, whether you're
| vaccinated or not?
|
| where did you get "every day starting this week" , pulled it
| out of your ass?
|
| I'll send you my managers email address you can ask him
| personally if you are so curious. Maybe you'd have better
| luck finding out than me.
| oldprogrammer2 wrote:
| If I had to guess, it's overzealous middle management layers
| wanting to show Jamie that their teams are proactive and
| doing more than the minimum. You know, because of their
| exceptional leadership qualities.
| geodel wrote:
| Besides what you said which is very likely true. These type
| of things are always verbal communication all the way to
| top. So it would not be surprise either if management made
| very measured release and written communication but
| internally/verbally it is hustling to get everyone back
| asap.
|
| We have roughly about same announcement. It is confounding
| to hear "You all did great working from home. Now be back
| asap to work and meet face to face." Apparently working via
| slack/webex from office is vastly more productive than
| doing same from home.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Kroger's CEO getting paid bonuses [1] to avoid giving front-
| line workers hazard pay while continuing to put their lives
| literally on the line over the past year gives me little hope
| that anyone will ever be held accountable for this sort of
| behavior.
|
| https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/kroger-blasted-for-
| endi....
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Probably because studies like this and others show that WFH is
| less productive.
| dominotw wrote:
| I highly doubt he is making his decisions based on academic
| studies. He is quoting dubious personal anecdotes to justify
| his decisions.
| [deleted]
| tobr wrote:
| What raises my eyebrows here is that the output is 100.00% in
| both periods, for both the 1st and 3rd quartile. This seems
| extremely artificial. Basically, when 1 task is assigned, 1.0000
| tasks will be completed. I've only skimmed but didn't see any
| discussion of how the tasks are assigned - is there any variation
| on that end?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Important to note that:
|
| > Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled
| professionals at a large Asian IT services company
|
| I suspect companies that already had strong WFH and remote
| friendly practices in place probably had very different outcomes.
| Western companies probably also have very different communication
| styles that would lead to different outcomes as well.
| jll29 wrote:
| It could well be that CoVid19 led to a 50% productivity loss
| (processes had to be completely reengineered or stood up from
| scratch without setting foot in the office).
|
| Then, if the actual measured loss is 20% then perhaps it actually
| went up by 30% (the difference).
|
| One cannot really conclude much from this study due to a lack of
| control, and I hope this is discussed honestly in the paper.
|
| One thing I could observe is that working from home required a
| lot of people that are not used to it to learn to communicate
| professionally in writing, which they weren't used to. With the
| option of clarifying via a quick personal chat on the corridor
| taken due to an "all remote" forced work mode, poor communicators
| really do need a lot of overhead in terms of extra
| Teams/Zoom/Slack... meetings to get their message across.
|
| Another observation was there was suddenly a lot of extra work.
| Initially I expected to have more time due to less business. In
| reality, CoVid19 also presented new opportunities, so extra
| projects were launched that would not have been required without
| the pandemic. Another variable that can't really be controlled.
|
| Working from home as a planned/rolled out thing for a percentage
| of people is vastly different from a pandemic improptu shutdown.
| I was actually surprised how quickly the whole business world
| adjusted. I've been arguing for years in favour of working from
| home but was told it can't be done, or people won't do enough
| work.
| esyir wrote:
| If there's something I've realised about the hn gestalt, it's
| that any anecdote in favour of wfh is taken as true by default,
| while any critique of wfh is assumed to be bunk unless
| absolutely faultness.
| pojzon wrote:
| Ofcourse my productivity dived.. I have to spend 3h per day on
| meetings to align with ppl on various thing because ppl force me
| to have f2f meetings over zoom. Things that could have been an
| email.
|
| On top of that are kids and wife who drive me crazy and
| constantly interrupt when you have to focus.
|
| This is not a correct way to measure WFH, during normal WFH
| situation my kids would be in school and my wife at work..
|
| And coworkers wouldnt be so desperate for interactions with
| others.
| not2b wrote:
| So, about the same amount of work got done, but it took more
| hours of working to get it done. Seems about right; efficiency
| per hour went down but the company got about the same amount of
| work from the employees. The per-hour productivity loss would be
| less if commute time were to be factored in: I'm putting in more
| hours of work, but my commute was more than an hour a day.
| Dowwie wrote:
| "Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of
| 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did
| not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about
| 20%. "
| DeRock wrote:
| Excludes commute time from work-from-office hours, which makes
| the comparison moot. I'd rather be unproductive at home, than
| unproductive in traffic.
|
| Also, this surveyed a single "large Asian IT services company".
| Its an anecdote with significant cultural work biases that may
| make this inapplicable to eg. American firms.
| kaskakokos wrote:
| Understandable, in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min, I
| have changed 40 min of healthy biking for 2+ hours of extra
| work.
|
| And these are not cold numbers from an study, it is my
| reality and it can explain my bad mood of the last times.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why are you working an extra two hours? Can't you bike 20
| minutes around your neighbourhood finish two hours earlier
| and do a quick 20 minutes after work?
| refactor_master wrote:
| That's what I do. Now I can allow myself a 20-min ride in
| the middle of the day. Does incredibly things for
| clearing your thoughts.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > in my case I commuted by bike in 20 min
|
| So ... you admit that you're an outlier, yet offer your
| opinion anyway.
|
| On HN, pedantry is our job.
| rkk3 wrote:
| "Employees with children living at home ... suffered a bigger
| decline in productivity than those without children"
|
| Surprising No One.
| jrcii2 wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear about the effects of pets, especially
| since so many people added them at some point during the
| pandemic so you could get some interesting before and after
| stats.
| tdeck wrote:
| > The jobs involve significant cognitive work, developing new
| software or hardware applications or solutions, collaborating
| with teams of professionals, working with clients, and engaging
| in innovation and continuous improvement.
|
| > The company provided rich data for a large sample of more than
| 10,000 employees, for 17 months before and during WFH, from its
| personnel records and workforce analytics systems. It has a
| highly-developed process for setting goals and tracking progress
| towards them, culminating in a primary output measure for each
| employee.
|
| I am skeptical. Why? I've never seen a half-decent way of
| quantifying output in all my time on the job at 7 companies.
| Sure, this company complies enough numbers so that clients and
| upper management feel the performance is quantified, but that's
| not the same thing. At a minimum this productivity metric needs
| to be interrogated more closely.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The arguments back and forth on this are always interesting to
| me.
|
| I don't particularly care either way since I've been work from
| home for the last 15 years. All I can say is that working from
| home during the pandemic isn't the same as normal times. Even if
| you don't have kids at home, there's a huge difference between
| working from home and staying at home all day long every day,
| versus going out for lunches (especially with friends), dinners,
| doing things on weekends, etc.
|
| I'm lucky enough to live in a suburb and have nice walking trails
| that I could use that were pretty much empty during this whole
| thing - for much lunch break I regularly eat lunch and take a
| small walk along a creek. Or take a quick dip in my swimming
| pool. I've had it a lot better than some of my friends in larger
| cities that felt like they could go practically nowhere and do
| almost nothing.
| stakkur wrote:
| They used tracking software on employee's computers. That alone
| was enough for me to close the link without reading further. My
| company uses Microsoft's inane version of this, and the only real
| thing it measures is the amount of money going into Microsoft's
| account.
| Guest42 wrote:
| One of the measures/trackers is the various spreadsheets that
| get opened. This certainly hurts the employees that have
| automated those aspects of their jobs. One of my initial roles
| had me inherit 15 different spreadsheet reports and over time I
| pushed all the report logic upstream so that I never had to
| open them. This made me much more productive whereas the
| tracking would show me as contributing very little.
| themanmaran wrote:
| "the analytics software takes into account whether an employee
| actually engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time)
| or merely procrastinates at their desk (not counted), by
| monitoring which software tools the employee uses"
|
| That's genuinely awful. I wonder to what extent employees are
| aware of the analytics, and how many people just set up macros
| look busy.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Keep in mind the study was made using : "personnel and
| analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a
| large Asian IT services company"
|
| In this industry we all know what this really means. Some of
| us have dealt with these "skilled professionals". I don't
| think spending more time in their IDE is going to make them
| any more productive than they already are...
| ska wrote:
| These sort of analytics are endemic in some industries; most
| people will have seen some generic notification, e.g. "system
| usage may be monitored on company equipment" but have no idea
| this means "your laptop is logging everything you do, all the
| time".
| ultrastable wrote:
| I agree it's awful, not to mention the fact that employees
| weren't informed of the Microsoft tracking software being
| used in the firstplace, but what's funny is that according to
| their analytics having yr IDE open & wiggling the mouse
| cursor counts as "engaged in a relevant task". whereas going
| on Twitter to get answers about a programming question would
| be counted as unproductive social media use
| avgDev wrote:
| These tools are definitely awful. Last week I spent hours
| reading a programming book because I was unsure about certain
| part of my code and needed a refresher.
|
| Also, a lot times I just need to think without typing
| anything. There are days where I only type few lines of code
| but getting the knowledge to write it takes hours of looking
| at the business and making sure there is no ill effects
| somewhere.
|
| I still deliver and my boss doesn't need to hold my hand.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Is that the thing called Insight that showed up in my corporate
| outlook?
| missedthecue wrote:
| It never seemed surprising to me to think that the disaster that
| has been high school and college from home might also be a
| problem for working from home. After all, one major difference
| between working from home and learning from home is that working
| relies on human interaction much more heavily than studying.
|
| But no one seems to even bother disputing that college-from-home
| is an inefficient way to learn compared to in-person. It is
| practically a universally accepted fact. Meanwhile, the entire
| internet seems to rush to find flaws, no matter how minute, in
| any study that casts the faintest negative light on working-from-
| home.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| i learned my entire curriculum from youtube 2014-2018 so i
| dispute that remote college is inefficient. however i would not
| dispute that universities would have any motivation to make the
| remote learning process work well for fear of future
| consequences.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Perhaps 'inefficient' was a poor choice of terms on my part.
| What I mean to say is that getting your education at an
| institution yields superior results compared to watching
| youtube videos.
|
| When learning in-person, cheating is less easily facilitated,
| student engagement is more naturally promoted, discussion and
| interaction is inherently encouraged, distractions are much
| fewer, and the general atmosphere is fully conducive to the
| retainment of information and study material.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| actually i highly dispute that. as good youtube videos have
| highly skilled tutors or highly skilled professors
| conveying the content. not random adjuncts, graduate
| students, assistant professors, and sometimes the
| occasional skilled lecturer. if i didn't watch youtube
| vidoes i would have never have passed. my experience in
| class was abysmal and going to class to figure out the exam
| content and then watching videos afterwards resulted in way
| better grades.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Youtube videos can be watched whether or not you attend a
| class with professional faculty and a group of minded
| colleagues in-person. It's not as if attending an
| institution precludes you from consuming other material.
| Students have been doing that for years.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| True. but that's similar to the common practice of going
| to meetings at work and then doing the actual hard
| concentration work at home after hours. I don't want to
| work 12 hours a day. I want to get my work done and be
| done. I'm looking for efficiency. Not a social club.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-14 23:01 UTC)