I think the net value added per programmer-hour of some open-source projects where everyone works remotely is far higher than anything done at an office for a corporation. Do you disagree about that?
I don’t know how I’d evaluate that without specific examples. But in general, if you think price signals are wrong or “more misleading than not” when it comes to measuring endpoints we actually care about, then I suppose it’s coherent to argue that we should ignore price signals.
I wouldn’t say that “in general” but there are some situations where I do think price signals mean little. For example:
prices of expensive modern art
prices of expensive clothes
valuations of some startups
salaries of many CEOs
America today has large income inequalities, but income inequality < wealth inequality < power inequality. One thing the items on the above list have in common is LARPing by the ultra-wealthy.
Can we measure this somehow? Seems like something someone would have already studied. For all the perceived value of open source, does it actually generate a lot of economic value? Probably, seems likely, but until it’s quantified we’re just arguing intuitions.
My own guess is that open source provides about average value, and the real high value adds come from engineers building things you’ve probably never heard of, like some obscure performance improvement or new feature that increases conversion rates half a percent for some large organization and thus produces tens of millions of dollars in revenue for one FTE quarter worth of work. And for this kind of work, maybe it really does help to be in person, because it requires knowing a large amount of context about the business in order to be able to effect the necessary changes in the code, whereas open source depends more on things that are overdetermined, and so just a matter of someone smart working on them, and thus less coordination is needed.
Sure, there are studies on programmer productivity with remote vs office work, but they don’t all agree, and measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult. (Do you use lines of code? Commits? What?)
Here’s one from Baidu that seems decent. According to this, “64% of developers said they were more productive working remotely, compared with 55% in 2021”. But bringing up such studies with xepo didn’t seem like it would be productive, considering the strong statements they made based on their personal feelings.
On priors I think you should strongly expect in-person co-working to produce much fatter right-tails. Communication bandwidth is much higher, and that’s the primary bottleneck for generating right-tail outcomes.
The Baidu study shows slightly longer right tails for individual productivity with remote work, and IIRC others have shown longer tails for remote work as well.
Or did you mean right tails for overall project results?
Yes, right tails for things that better represent actual value produced in the world, i.e. projects/products/etc. I’m pretty skeptical of productivity metrics for individual developers like the ones described in that paper, since almost by construction they’re incapable of capturing right-tail outcomes, and also fail to capture things like “developer is actually negative value”. I’m open to the idea that remote work has better median performance characteristics, though expect this to be pretty noisy.
Oh, I actually think those studies are probably accurate for the thing they’re measuring, which is ”short-term individual developer productivity”. But they don’t really account for “long-term productivity” nor “team productivity”, both of which I think benefit a lot from being in the office. You get an uptick in people’s ability to focus, but downtick in people’s ability to communicate, and both education and coordination are dependent on the latter.
As a counterpoint, consider that ~every major tech company is constantly pushing for people to be back in the office. I know the reddit groupthink about this is that managers are just being dumb, but I think it’s more likely that the individual devs don’t see the impact that working-remotely is having on the productivity of the company over time.
I think the net value added per programmer-hour of some open-source projects where everyone works remotely is far higher than anything done at an office for a corporation. Do you disagree about that?
I don’t know how I’d evaluate that without specific examples. But in general, if you think price signals are wrong or “more misleading than not” when it comes to measuring endpoints we actually care about, then I suppose it’s coherent to argue that we should ignore price signals.
I wouldn’t say that “in general” but there are some situations where I do think price signals mean little. For example:
prices of expensive modern art
prices of expensive clothes
valuations of some startups
salaries of many CEOs
America today has large income inequalities, but income inequality < wealth inequality < power inequality. One thing the items on the above list have in common is LARPing by the ultra-wealthy.
Can we measure this somehow? Seems like something someone would have already studied. For all the perceived value of open source, does it actually generate a lot of economic value? Probably, seems likely, but until it’s quantified we’re just arguing intuitions.
My own guess is that open source provides about average value, and the real high value adds come from engineers building things you’ve probably never heard of, like some obscure performance improvement or new feature that increases conversion rates half a percent for some large organization and thus produces tens of millions of dollars in revenue for one FTE quarter worth of work. And for this kind of work, maybe it really does help to be in person, because it requires knowing a large amount of context about the business in order to be able to effect the necessary changes in the code, whereas open source depends more on things that are overdetermined, and so just a matter of someone smart working on them, and thus less coordination is needed.
Sure, there are studies on programmer productivity with remote vs office work, but they don’t all agree, and measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult. (Do you use lines of code? Commits? What?)
Here’s one from Baidu that seems decent. According to this, “64% of developers said they were more productive working remotely, compared with 55% in 2021”. But bringing up such studies with xepo didn’t seem like it would be productive, considering the strong statements they made based on their personal feelings.
On priors I think you should strongly expect in-person co-working to produce much fatter right-tails. Communication bandwidth is much higher, and that’s the primary bottleneck for generating right-tail outcomes.
The Baidu study shows slightly longer right tails for individual productivity with remote work, and IIRC others have shown longer tails for remote work as well.
Or did you mean right tails for overall project results?
Yes, right tails for things that better represent actual value produced in the world, i.e. projects/products/etc. I’m pretty skeptical of productivity metrics for individual developers like the ones described in that paper, since almost by construction they’re incapable of capturing right-tail outcomes, and also fail to capture things like “developer is actually negative value”. I’m open to the idea that remote work has better median performance characteristics, though expect this to be pretty noisy.
Oh, I actually think those studies are probably accurate for the thing they’re measuring, which is ”short-term individual developer productivity”. But they don’t really account for “long-term productivity” nor “team productivity”, both of which I think benefit a lot from being in the office. You get an uptick in people’s ability to focus, but downtick in people’s ability to communicate, and both education and coordination are dependent on the latter.
As a counterpoint, consider that ~every major tech company is constantly pushing for people to be back in the office. I know the reddit groupthink about this is that managers are just being dumb, but I think it’s more likely that the individual devs don’t see the impact that working-remotely is having on the productivity of the company over time.