Geeks vs. Writers

Daily performance analyzed

We love data and we track everything here at .io. So couple of weeks ago we decided to track our team performance in terms of keyboard and mouse activity during the working day.

Our team is small — 1 designer, 2 developers and 2 content editors. And a couple of management guys of course. Our office is at the floor 23, so apart from staring in the window we work a lot here.

We installed simple Chrome plugin on every macbook and collected some statistics within a week with our event tracking system t.onthe.io.

Developers showed pretty unexpected figures. They have less keypresses than editors and managers — around 4k every day.

Developers type 3 times less than other team members.

The most popular key is Command (on Macs) — 20% of all keys. The least popular is Spacebar. They use Tab key 5 times more frequently than all the rest team members together.

Their activity during the day (and night) is the less predictable and the activity graphs have lots of smooth areas and jumps. That’s because they walk around, think a lot and after a “eureka” moment sit down and write tons of code.

Managers are total winners in terms of amount of pressed keys — 3 times more than developers and even 1.5 times more than editors!

A manager types more than 23k characters per day.

They press a key every 3 seconds in average. Emails take a lot.

Managers’ activity during the day is quite stable — they write and receive letters all day long. An average amount of keys pressed during the day is 23k and more. Spammers.

Editors are typing twice as much as developers and make less mistakes. Backspace usage is less than for all the rest team.

Editors make 2 times less spelling mistakes, than all the team members together.

And the most popular key is… the space — 10% of all keypresses.

Editors’ activity is not stable but pretty predictable. Activity peaks fall on the beginning of the day — when all the articles are written. For the rest of the day they read them through, replace the words, read again and again, and then post.

Designer is pretty predictable — Command and Backspace are two buttons that he presses 20% of all. He does more mouse moves than developers and content editors together. His mouse travels 1 kilometer every day.

Designer’s mouse may travel 20km per month.

Office manager is the least active, making only 2k keypresses per day. That’s 5 times less than managers. 11% of all used keys is Space.

What’s curious — the least popular keys are Capslock and Right Mouse Button. Somewhere around 0.1% of all keypresses together. It’s time to make some changes to keyboards.

So we have managers who are keypress leaders. Designer who is a mouse movement champion. And editors who are doing 2 times less errors than the team average.

Now we are wondering what we should track next. Ideas?