The Daily Life of Software Engineers during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This addresses the impact of remote work on software engineers' routines and outcomes, but it is incremental as it confirms existing patterns without major new insights.
The study analyzed the daily activities of software engineers working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that time spent on specific activities was similar to office work and unrelated to well-being or productivity.
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, software engineers' daily life was disrupted and abruptly forced into remote working from home. This change deeply impacted typical working routines, affecting both well-being and productivity. Moreover, this pandemic will have long-lasting effects in the software industry, with several tech companies allowing their employees to work from home indefinitely if they wish to do so. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze and understand how a typical working day looks like when working from home and how individual activities affect software developers' well-being and productivity. We performed a two-wave longitudinal study involving almost 200 globally carefully selected software professionals, inferring daily activities with perceived well-being, productivity, and other relevant psychological and social variables. Results suggest that the time software engineers spent doing specific activities from home was similar when working in the office. However, we also found some significant mean differences. The amount of time developers spent on each activity was unrelated to their well-being, perceived productivity, and other variables. We conclude that working remotely is not per se a challenge for organizations or developers.