14% of remote software engineers do almost no work vs. 6% in office | Hacker News Reader

14% of remote software engineers do almost no work vs. 6% in office

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6 pointsabduhl6 comments

This looks like it's mostly an org problem that doesn't seem they controlled for. I've been part of several orgs that enable meaningless work. They insist you document everything and that you make a big deal out of trivial work. If people don't feel they are meaningfully contributing, they probably won't invest as much effort, and this is incidental to how an org is structured, how many engineers are assigned to a project, and how the processes work... and working from home just means you can get away with doing less. In other words, I wish this study also measured overall satisfaction and other things like stress, because I think that gap comes with a cost to the employee's overall wellbeing. Using a computer in the office or at home has no functional difference.

I don't understand this comment. The graphic states that this is based on an analysis of over 50,000 engineers from 100s of companies. What are you proposing they control for (and how would they control for it)? The dataset seems large and the correlation they draw is directly between two parameters: their measurement/evaluation of work and work from home vs hybrid vs in office.

You are trying to make up an excuse for why the correlation it exists, but that seems orthogonal to the analysis.

I haven't looked at the study, just the thread, and I'm just pointing out that there is more to work than just raw contributions, at least if we want to treat people like people and not just machines that are meant to just increase the value of a company.

Remote work showing low contributions is a symptom of something else and I don't see this being addressed. Working from home allows a certain subset of engineers to get away with coping with certain org issues... sure they are not working, but that tends to be a problem with leadership and how orgs are structured. If you want to contribute, if you like the job, working from home should have no impact (aside from uncontrollable environment issues, which often are worse in the office).

>> Remote work showing low contributions is a symptom of something else and I don't see this being addressed.

That isn't the purpose of the analysis though. The analysis just provides data that more remote workers contribute nearly zero as compared to those in office.

It seems like you are trying to explain why remote workers underperforming is an organizational problem rather than something that can be put on the workers. Which might be true, but it seems kind of like the "it's always management's fault" argument.

> The analysis just provides data that more remote workers contribute nearly zero as compared to those in office.

Sure, that's fine, and I'm just giving my opinion on how that correlation isn't interesting unless there are more reasons to think it's a cause. The way it's presented seems to put the spotlight on remote work, whether intentional or not. I suspect there isn't as much of a gap if there was a clear delineation between those who like their job and those who don't. Maybe it would still be the same result, it would be more interesting either way.

Wow, they're really trying to kill off remote work after telling us all we had to do it during covid...

I was initially pro office prior to covid - don't see any reason to go back.

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