Google’s Internal Data Show Engineers Found It Harder to Code From Home

Google’s engineering directors are grappling with a worrisome trend: internal data that indicate productivity during the coronavirus shutdowns deteriorated among engineers, particularly newly hired ones.

One internal survey viewed by The Information found that in the three months ended in June, only 31% of the company’s engineers polled felt they had been highly productive, down 8 percentage points from a record high in the March quarter. That decline and more recent data on engineers’ coding output from the third quarter caused its head of engineering productivity, Michael Bachman, last week to email senior Google managers and executives, drawing attention to the data. He said the findings are “still relevant for all teams across the company,” not just engineers.