Working from home is just different
Some people say it’s the future, others that kills companies. Numbers say that it’s mostly a matter of taste.
Impact on personal life and environment
I have been WFH (as a software developer) since the country went in lockdown in 2020. Overall the experience was very positive. I had more free time, I could focus better, I achieved some interesting results at work, and I didn’t catch a single cold in 18 months.
I made some estimations. I saved about 821 hours in commuting time door-to-door. That’s equivalent to 43 extra hours a month. If it doesn’t seem much, think it in terms of having 5.4 working days to dedicate to yourself every month. It’s hard now to say that I don’t have time for the gym.
The distance I didn’t cover is 32.000 km (19.800 miles), approximately equivalent to Amsterdam — Beijing… 4 times. Covering that distance with an average car is equal to 11 tons of CO2. To visualize 11 tons of CO2 imagine 7.000 single-use plastic bags that is probably more than what you would ever use in an entire life of groceries.
With the extra time and less stress, I could dedicate radically more time to family and to self-study adding new weapons to my arsenal. I went down from 6 cups of coffee a day, to just 1–2, I had more time to eat healthier, and I may have lost some weight (or maybe my belt became longer).
This was just the latest 18 months, most of which lived with the anxiety and limitations of the pandemic. What could be the impact on an entire career?
Productivity and job satisfaction
Productivity and job satisfaction is a very personal topic. Especially during COVID when everybody was forced to work from home, opinions on WFH range from “amazing improvement” to “worst nightmare of my life”.
Before COVID, Bloom (2014) studied WFH applied to call centers. Measuring productivity for that kind of job is easy, and metrics show that productivity on average goes up. Bloom summarizes it in “offices are actually incredibly distracting places”. He also points out that, even if some people perform better in the office, opening positions to remote workers has the benefit to invite talents in a bigger radius and including people such as highly qualified mothers (and people with disabilities) who would be left out with traditional in-office work.
Ford (2020) studied WFH during the pandemic. He saw that productivity on average improved slightly, but individual experience varied a lot.
This may also have to do with being unprepared for WFH. Common problems were the lack of proper space at home, bad connectivity (“can you hear me?” is the quote of 2020), and lack of support from the company. These are all simple problems that can be solved with a bit of organization. There are also personal factors in place. Almost everyone agrees that WFH has the advantage of saving commuting time, “but for others, the lack of a commute removed a period of relaxation” (Ford, 2020). It’s really impossible to please everyone, apparently.
What about software developers?
Opinions, as usual, largely disagree. Some studies found out that software developers suffered a lot from the lack of face-to-face collaboration and that creativity dropped, others found the opposite. The issue with these studies is that during COVID everyone was forced into WFH regardless of personal preference or access to adequate equipment. Even in the same team, working on the same things, there is no consensus.
Bao (2020) monitored 107 developers’ daily activities from eight projects in 70 working days in Baidu. He concluded that WFH is different in these terms:
- Individual productivity is the same for 84.8% of developers, while the rest can be either more productive or less.
- The number of changed lines on average decreased while WFH.
- The success rate of builds remains constant, but releases are less successful WFH.
These considerations may depend on the specifics of the organization. It looks like their releasing process may rely on a lot of face-to-face collaboration, for example. However, Bao agrees with Ford on the problems: kids, lack self-discipline, poor equipment are the source of inefficiency. The conclusion is that WFH is beneficial overall (also for cost-saving), but it must be well organized.
A company like Github is in the position to give an opinion based on actual numbers on a large audience, and Github’s numbers are more or less all positive.
During the early months of the pandemic, developer activity was consistent or up. They estimated that companies’ ceremonies were initially disrupted, but people quickly adjusted. Collaboration in open source increased. While the number of pull requests remained unchanged, the time to merge increased suggesting that solitary work goes up, collaboration goes down. What a surprise, I would say.
My personal experience suggests that WFH works well, but only if the job is properly organized. If you try to replicate office life while WFH, what you get is a frustrating disaster. In an office, it is normal (but disruptive) to have colleagues coming at our desks for questions, while WFH it’s awkward to call someone for a simple question, and using Slack is not a perfect substitute. The solution is to organize the work to minimize the need for synchronous communication in the first place, but it’s not something doable snapping fingers.
The story of Gitlab demonstrates that it’s perfectly possible to WFH full time, with no physical office, distributed around the globe, fully asynchronous, developing an amazing software product, and become a publicly traded company worth $15 billion in 7 years (Forbes, 2021).
Conclusions
It’s undeniable that WFH is a game-changer for many because it can save enormous amount of time, money, and environmental impact. Productivity is roughly unaffected on average, but on singular aspects, it can go up or down depending on the nature of the task and the individual. Companies embracing WFH will have access to a bigger talent pool and they may save some costs in office space, but they have to do their homework to make WFH efficient.
The experience during COVID is probably the worst way to evaluate WFH. Too many had a bad experience caused by improvisation and restrictions that had nothing to do with remote working.
WFH is not for everyone. Who doesn’t have a proper home office and who lacks on self-discipline is going to perform worse. It’s also a matter of personal preference: I know lots of people who actually like to work in an office.
The bottom line is that we will never find a one-size-fits-all solution because there are even people who like commuting.
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