A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11147v3
• Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2021 23:46:50 GMT
• Title: A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Authors: Denae Ford and Margaret-Anne Storey and Thomas Zimmermann and Christian Bird and Sonia Jaffe and Chandra Maddila and Jenna L. Butler and Brian Houck and Nachiappan Nagappan
• Abstract summary: The COVID-19 pandemic has provoked an overnight exodus of developers that normally worked in an office setting to working from home. To find out how developers and their productivity were affected, we distributed two surveys. We find that there is a dichotomy of developer experiences influenced by many different factors.
• Score: 16.982574711079423
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core and has provoked an overnight exodus of developers that normally worked in an office setting to working from home. The magnitude of this shift and the factors that have accompanied this new unplanned work setting go beyond what the software engineering community has previously understood to be remote work. To find out how developers and their productivity were affected, we distributed two surveys (with a combined total of 3,634 responses that answered all required questions) -- weeks apart to understand the presence and prevalence of the benefits, challenges, and opportunities to improve this special circumstance of remote work. From our thematic qualitative analysis and statistical quantitative analysis, we find that there is a dichotomy of developer experiences influenced by many different factors (that for some are a benefit, while for others a challenge). For example, a benefit for some was being close to family members but for others having family members share their working space and interrupting their focus, was a challenge. Our surveys led to powerful narratives from respondents and revealed the scale at which these experiences exist to provide insights as to how the future of (pandemic) remote work can evolve.

Related papers

• Experiences and attitudes toward working remotely from home in a time of pandemic: A snapshot from a New Zealand-based online survey [0.0]
  This paper provides a quantitative snapshot of remote working using survey data from participants whose jobs can be done from home. It was found that, not only was remote working common, but that hybrid working arrangements were also more prevalent. The most common perceived barriers to working from home were slow internet speed, the need to attend face-to-face meetings, and limited space at home to work.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-05T01:56:59Z)
• Collaborative Gym: A Framework for Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration [51.452664740963066]
  Collaborative Gym is a framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-20T09:21:15Z)
• Analyzing Human Questioning Behavior and Causal Curiosity through Natural Queries [91.70689724416698]
  We present NatQuest, a collection of 13,500 naturally occurring questions from three diverse sources. Our analysis reveals a significant presence of causal questions (up to 42%) within the dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-30T17:55:28Z)
• A Survey of Neural Code Intelligence: Paradigms, Advances and Beyond [84.95530356322621]
  This survey presents a systematic review of the advancements in code intelligence. It covers over 50 representative models and their variants, more than 20 categories of tasks, and an extensive coverage of over 680 related works. Building on our examination of the developmental trajectories, we further investigate the emerging synergies between code intelligence and broader machine intelligence.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-21T08:54:56Z)
• WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks? [83.19032025950986]
  We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. WorkArena is a benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. BrowserGym is an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-12T14:58:45Z)
• Surveying (Dis)Parities and Concerns of Compute Hungry NLP Research [75.84463664853125]
  We provide a first attempt to quantify concerns regarding three topics, namely, environmental impact, equity, and impact on peer reviewing. We capture existing (dis)parities between different and within groups with respect to seniority, academia, and industry. We devise recommendations to mitigate found disparities, some of which already successfully implemented.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-29T12:44:53Z)
• EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric Videos [89.9573084127155]
  EgoTaskQA benchmark provides home for crucial dimensions of task understanding through question-answering on real-world egocentric videos. We meticulously design questions that target the understanding of (1) action dependencies and effects, (2) intents and goals, and (3) agents' beliefs about others. We evaluate state-of-the-art video reasoning models on our benchmark and show their significant gaps between humans in understanding complex goal-oriented egocentric videos.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-10-08T05:49:05Z)
• Understanding Developers Well-Being and Productivity: a 2-year Longitudinal Analysis during the COVID-19 Pandemic [20.958668676181947]
  We explore changes in well-being, productivity, social contacts, and needs of software engineers during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, well-being and quality of social contacts increased while emotional loneliness decreased as lockdown measures were relaxed. A preliminary investigation into the future of work at the end of the pandemic revealed a consensus among developers for a preference of hybrid work arrangements.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-19T18:07:21Z)
• Impact on the Productivity of Remotely Working IT Professionals of Bangladesh during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 [3.509221192489875]
  The recent pandemic situation has forced the IT professionals of Bangladesh to adopt remote work. The aim of this study is to find out whether remote work can be continued even after the lockdown is lifted.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-26T15:58:22Z)
• Predictors of Well-being and Productivity among Software Professionals during the COVID-19 Pandemic -- A Longitudinal Study [16.576437265776573]
  The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to impose movement restrictions on their citizens. This paper investigates the impact of these restrictions on an individual level among software engineers who were working from home.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-07-24T15:32:44Z)
• How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity? -- A Case Study of Baidu During COVID-19 Pandemic [11.883150454190817]
  This study investigates the difference of developer productivity between working from home and working onsite. We collect approximately four thousand records of 139 developers' activities of 138 working days. We find that WFH has both positive and negative impacts on developer productivity in terms of different metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-27T05:31:26Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.