'Remote' (From Home) Tech Workers Are More Productive for a Lot of Reasons
"Democracy Dies in Darkness", says the paper owned by someone who passively promoted Donald Trump 2 months ago (many subscribers, who had chosen to pay him, canceled their subscription over it)
IT is difficult to comprehend why so many people will willingly trust an oligarch like Jeff Bezos as a source of news. The truth is, he merely bought a brand and many people trust this brand for nostalgic reasons. This paper is older than him.
Yesterday morning (US time) the Bezos Post (Amazon) sort of collectively slandered software engineers or programmers who work from home. It's easy to see how Amazon, with ongoing mass layoffs, stands to benefit from this narrative. Amazon is currently the undisputed king of "RTO" as mass layoffs (demanding people come back to the office, knowing a huge proportion of them would resign, instead).
This "Denisov-Blanch's disinformation ["The ghost engineers haunting Silicon Valley programming payrolls"] needs addressing and rebuttal," one reader told me. It cites some study and says "[a] Stanford researcher says data on programmer productivity suggests 14 percent of remote software engineers get barely anything done."
Why is the Bezos Post promoting only this "study" and why now?
I myself have worked from home since 2007. Except for rare occasions (like visiting clients for a few days), I never worked in an office-like environment since 2007. I actually became vastly more productive when I started working from home. I regretted that I had not done so sooner. A large part of my decision was my grandfather, who told me something to the effect of, "if you don't try it, how will you know?"
This was 17.5 years ago. I went to Micro Direct (when it still existed here), purchased a large second monitor (I've used at least dual head since I was 19), and then did work from my desk in my apartment. That work was mostly coding. I was writing programs, albeit this time with fewer distractions. My work was assessed not based on clock in/out but based on what was produced and how fast, the quality of the work and so on.
So why did the Bezos Post cherry-pick some FUD?
"The core assertion [in the above article/study] seems to be that the number of commits in a content management system stands for an accurate assessment of productivity," the reader noted. "That's, as everyone knows, bullshit. However, you'll have to track down the original source, it's not linked to in the above article."
Maybe they even distort what the original study said. The Bezos Post isn't exactly known for its objectivity; it was not this bad when it was known as the Washington Post. Bezos looks at press ownership as a route towards financial (personal) gain.
I could go on and on about how working from home is better and I wrote many articles about it during lock-downs a few years ago.
The Bezos-owned media should disclose its conflict of interest here. █