A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- Denae Ford ,
- Margaret-Anne Storey ,
- Tom Zimmermann ,
- Christian Bird ,
- Sonia Jaffe ,
- Chandra Maddila ,
- Jenna Butler ,
- Brian Houck ,
- Nachi Nagappan
ArXiv
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 3,634 responses)—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.
A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers in Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers in Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic—Dr. Denae Ford Robinson, Invited Seminar @ CMU HCII
The mass shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate, communicate, and define productivity. Since the early months of the pandemic, we have been collecting data on changes in developer productivity, pivots in strategy to remote onboarding, and recommendations on how to better support work during this time along social and technical axes. In this talk, I will present findings from several empirical studies with over 4,509 responses about the challenges and triumphs software developers have had amidst unconventional work-from-home circumstances and how some developers have taken the pandemic as a call to use their technical abilities to support a broader social good. I will close with open questions about hybrid technical work and how remote work will continue to evolve.
Speaker’s bio:
Dr. Denae Ford Robinson is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in the SAINTes group and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In her work, she identifies and dismantles cognitive and social barriers by designing mechanisms to support software developer participation in online socio-technical ecosystems. She is best known for her research on just-in-time mentorship as a mode to empower welcoming engagement in collaborative Q&A for online programming communities, including open-source software and work to empower marginalized software developers in online communities.
She received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. She also received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Graduate Minor in Cognitive Science from North Carolina State University. She is also a recipient of the National GEM Consortium Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. Her research publications can be found under her pen name ‘Denae Ford’. More information about her latest research can be found on her website: http://denaeford.me/ (opens in new tab)
Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022: Hybrid workspaces
The New Future of Work Report summarizes important research and developments that can help us understand and improve the future of work. This report is organized by changes in work practices at four different “scales”: individuals, teams, organizations, and society.
Throughout, researchers at Microsoft are using methods such as the latest advances in AI, causal inference, surveys and interviews, and prototype-building to uncover challenges and opportunities facing workers.
But this report does not only feature research done at Microsoft: there is amazing research shaping the future of work done by researchers around the world. The report includes this work as well and forecasts from some of these experts.
About this video: By one rule of thumb, workspace expenses equal 10% of wage costs, which means well-crafted workplaces that boost productivity can pay for themselves. Discover how blended spaces can optimize teamwork and efficiency, in the New Future of Work Report 2022: https://aka.ms/NFW (opens in new tab)