Pandemic Work-Life Survey
From May into July, we surveyed members of the Code & Supply community about their work-life during the COVID-19 pandemic. We received seventy-one anonymous responses. The survey was twofold, focusing on personal and familial questions before inquiring about work-life.
More than half of respondents said their mental health was worse than usual, while only about 15% said it improved.
Only a few respondents (7) said that someone in their household or they cared for was diagnosed with COVID-19. 57% of respondents knew someone who was hospitalized or died because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Working Arrangements
Our respondents' responses about working arrangements prior to and during the pandemic and preferred arrangement going forward reflect the industry-wide shift in preference toward remote work.
When are respondents planning to return to the office? Responses reflect a similar level of uncertainty. 79% of respondents have an idea of what their working arrangement will be now or in the coming months.
That approximately 21% of respondents don’t know when they will return to the office is interesting. That group could end up in the “never or almost never” group just as easily as the scheduled return groups.
Delving into the workplace questions, we found that most respondents’ work hours stayed the same or decreased during COVID.
This change in work hours is of interest to our survey team as we wanted to understand if working from home increased the amount of time respondents spent working. There’s some correlation, but not a strong one.
Pandemic Policies and Job Security
Employers did make some changes. The top ones reported were stipends given for home offices, more flex time, and employer-mandated PTO days. 33% of respondents — 22 people — said their employer had no new policies. Seventeen respondents were required to be in the office with masks at the time of the survey. Notably, 29% of respondents’ companies provided a stipend for home office equipment.
Tech workers surveyed felt fairly stable. 28% of respondents reported that their employer withheld raises or bonuses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also asked if respondents were concerned about finding a new job in the industry during the pandemic. 85% were somewhat or very confident they would be able to find a new job. 20% felt there was too much economic uncertainty to confidently leave an undesirable working environment, even if it was remote.
Twenty percent of respondents felt there was too much economic uncertainty to leave an undesirable workplace.
This uncertainty is alarming but unsurprising given respondents’ general worsened mental health and the general state of the economy in 2020.
Future Work
It’s clear that follow-up work would help us understand how much C&S members and friends are participating in the so-called Great Resignation. We’ll also want to poll on outcomes versus preferred working arrangements: did folks shift to remote work in their current role or did they get a new job in order to shift?
We are also interested in how the impact of additional variants such as the Delta variant change return-to-office initiatives.
If you’d like to participate in our future surveys or our survey working group, join us in #team-survey on C&S Slack or sign up for the C&S mailing list.
We periodically conduct a compensation survey for tech workers with an emphasis on software professionals. The last one was for 2020 and was released in early 2021. You can read more about it on the Code & Supply Compensation Survey site.
Colin Dean helped to edit this article.
