Hacker News Reader

Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc.

And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.

To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.

View on HN

I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...

Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.

For what it's worth, my old job was quantifying it in meaningful ways and we *were* revealing, statistically, to be incredibly productive.

And in my own analysis: PRs, test coverage, "story points finished", lines of code written, etc. I was more productive working from home on a reduced hour schedule than I had been working on a strict, high-hours one, too.

If you are delivering same output while being happier that’s by definition increased productivity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com