A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Denae Ford, Margaret-Anne Storey, Thomas Zimmermann and, Christian Bird, Sonia Jaffe, Chandra Maddila, Jenna L. Butler and, Brian Houck, Nachiappan Nagappan

TL;DR
This study investigates how the abrupt shift to remote work during COVID-19 affected software developers' productivity and experiences, revealing a dichotomy of benefits and challenges through extensive surveys and analysis.
Contribution
It provides new insights into the diverse experiences of developers working remotely during the pandemic, highlighting factors influencing productivity and well-being.
Findings
Developers experienced both benefits and challenges in remote work.
Family proximity was beneficial for some but disruptive for others.
The study offers insights for future remote work policies.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core and has provoked an overnight exodus of developers that normally worked in an office setting to working from home. The magnitude of this shift and the factors that have accompanied this new unplanned work setting go beyond what the software engineering community has previously understood to be remote work. To find out how developers and their productivity were affected, we distributed two surveys (with a combined total of 3,634 responses that answered all required questions) -- weeks apart to understand the presence and prevalence of the benefits, challenges, and opportunities to improve this special circumstance of remote work. From our thematic qualitative analysis and statistical quantitative analysis, we find that there is a dichotomy of developer experiences influenced by many different factors (that for some are a benefit,…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
