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.
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.