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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, subjective studies like this are worse than useless, because they're destined to just reflect the inherent biases of the respondents.

IIRC Google did have some objective data that purely looked at average commit rates and lines of code before and after working from home, and they saw a significant decrease in productivity during WFH (again, to your point, this was pretty early on in the pandemic and tons of people were dealing with childcare issues, etc.)

I remember people commenting "oh, lines of code, ha ha, you can't use that to measure productivity", and while that may be true for comparing individuals and groups, across a very large sample size over time (i.e. all Google developers), this is actually an excellent objective metric to gauge productivity.

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>...IIRC Google did have some objective data that purely looked at average commit rates and lines of code before and after working from home, and they saw a significant decrease in productivity during WFH

In trying to find out more info on this, I only found references to an internal subjective survey (which as you point out are not that valuable):

>...Most notably from the June internal survey, only 31% of company engineers reported feeling "highly productive," down 8% from earlier this year. Furthermore, only 53% of engineers reportedly felt satisfied with their ability to manage their workloads. Of those, 30% spent less time coding that quarter than the previous quarter.

When google was asked for comment:

>...In a response to The Information, a Google spokesperson said the company-wide productivity rebounded after a short decline and has since exceeded pre-quarantine levels.

I don't know if this measure of productivity was objective either, but I suspect, that Google is much more interested in meeting product deadlines, numbers of deferred features and those kinds of things are fairly easy to measure. It sounds like Google's experience has been similar to every other tech company and having the bulk of people working from home has not hurt productivity.

https://austonia.com/google-struggle-with-work-from-home

This was where I originally remember reading the information about Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24759929. The linked Information article does discuss the survey but also the objective measures Google uses (like commit volume) that declined.

Isn't Google famous for long work hours and providing amenities to keep people at work longer? I would think any workplace that had a standard 50+ hour work week is going to see a drop in productivity when moving to WFH. Left to their own devices, most people in that situation are going to work less.

Is Google standard 50 hours a week?

In the company I worked for we saw a 30%+ increase in number of commits immediately after WFH started, due to reduced time wasted in meetings and other office activities.

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