What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?

It's hard to take this seriously with so little time dedicated to evaluating culture, especially from a highly political company like Google which is famous for being a ball pit for gifted children at this point. If motivation matters (as suggested by the emphasis on task variety} then it matters if the path of least resistance is to yes-man our most noisey peers. Going deeper, cultural hostility explains manager-employee relationships and inter-employee relationships to a certain degree and even if it can't explain th perfectly it can predict them comfortably.

What's more, you can't get a good sense of culture impact through employee surveys like this paper is trying to do because that implies you already understand the culture in the surveyed regions/companies which does not seem to have transpired here. Evaluating the effect of perks, time obligations, etc. in isolation only serves to perpetuate whichever culture was already dominant while simultaneously failing to ask any interesting questions about why that observation is dominant. You could publish 200 papers like this one and yet without geography-centric comparisons to places like Latin America, Europe, and SEA or cross-political comparisons such as differences between American Blue and Red employees, all you're evaluating is what the dominant group in these orgs prefers.

I have no doubt this comment will be buried with downvotes and minimal replies though, because the biggest lie of all that I see perpetuated here is that software development is our can be politically neutral (easily disproven by looking into who can speak to what topics in a public company vs. a company with ties to given like the many contractors). The reason I'm saying it though is that at some point, probably after we've retired, there will be devs who aren't so drowned in money that it makes more sense for companies to pander to our prejudice and when that time comes the forerunners (from every leaning because these things are often company specific) will be in for a rude awakening as they see their work seething as the foundation for producing machinations they deem nightmarish.

Note that this is measuring developers' feelings about productivity, not actual productivity.

This looks like social science research, not software engineering.

2019