Smashing out code - in the long run, it may be better to do it in the office

With employers increasingly demanding their workers return to the office to perform the bulk of their work, many are asking what the evidence base underpinning such edicts is.

When it comes to software engineering in particular, bosses now have something solid to point to in the form of a high-quality study that suggests remote work may give coders an edge in the short term but is less productive than working face-to-face with team members in the long term.

The study undertaken by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research completed before and during the initial stages of the Covid pandemic and focusing on software engineering employees at a Fortune 500 company in the US, found that being near coworkers has trade-offs.

“Proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output,” the researchers found. 

When software engineers are together in the office they give each other more feedback. The study tracked two teams working for the same company, one solely based in one office, and the other team spread across two buildings due to space constraints. The latter team subsequently did the majority of their meetings online. 

When looking at digitally recorded engineering feedback on each other’s work, the single building team commented on colleagues work more than the team spread across two buildings, several blocks apart.

“When offices were open, engineers working in the same building as all their teammates received 22 percent more online feedback than engineers with distant teammates. After offices closed for COVID-19, this advantage largely disappears. Yet sitting together reduces engineers' programming output, particularly for senior engineers,” the researchers’ paper notes.

Source: Emanuel, Harrington & Pallais, NBER Working Paper Series

Naturally enough, teams physically located together communicate with each other more often, which may generate useful feedback, but in the software development environment, appears to actually slow down the process.

So a remote team is better able to knuckle down and smash out code, creating applications faster and therefore gaining a productivity edge. Having just one team member working remotely reduces feedback among co-located workers.

But those short-term gains come partly at the cost of workers’ longrun development. Remote work creates fewer opportunities for mentorship, and career development.

“Proximity impacts career trajectories, dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run. These results can help to explain national trends: workers in their twenties who often need mentorship and workers over 40 who often provide mentorship are more likely to return to the office,” the researchers point out.

Economist Natalia Emanuel, who co-authored the research, explains the findings in detail in a podcast from The Atlantic.

Source: Emanuel, Harrington & Pallais, NBER Working Paper Series

“I think that is consistent with what we saw at Meta, right? Early in the pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg was like, Yeah, this sounds great. People seem to actually be more productive when they’re remote,” she said.

“And then sort of three years in, that’s when Mark Zuckerberg was like, Actually, let’s come back to the office. It seems that people actually are more productive when we have some amount of in-person time. And so it does seem as though it does take a little bit of patience to be able to realise these different effects over different time horizons.”

What does it mean for software companies and IT departments with software development teams pushing to continue working remotely for at least part of the work week? For the long term development of teams, face to face contact is important, so opportunities need to be created to allow brainstorming, feedback, and mentorship.

Emanuel suggests remote work is here to stay, and the productivity gains highlighted in previous studies is are too attractive to overlook. But further experimentation is required to find the right hybrid balance. 

“I think we see a lot of firms doing some incredibly creative things, whether that’s quarterly offsites or teams coming in at regular intervals and trying to do sort of a round-robin of who's meeting with what,” she told The Atlantic. 

“And so I do think we’re in a period of experimentation while we’re trying to learn how this is going to work. But yes, I would definitely say that there is a world in which this does work and that we have to figure out exactly how it's going to work.”