Labor efficiency: office versus outsourcing?

Question

Project management

There is such a discussion habrahabr.ru/qa/39189/ about labor productivity and the length of the working day. And in particular there are such opinions:

I don’t like to sit in the office - I work at home, and I come to the office once a week for six hours

From here your opinion is interesting:
Web development, programming in the office, on outsourcing and partial outsourcing, once a week, for example, meetings, work in the office. What do you think is the difference in labor productivity, efficiency?
On average, can outsourcing be equal in efficiency to an office? Clearly there may be exceptions, but on average?

Answer 1

1. A person considers the time spent on the road to and from the office to work => those who work in the office have less rest.
2. Calculate how much time you spend in the office talking in a team on working moments. Take the timer directly on your phone and start it every time. Many are annoyed when, during the coding process, Vasya comes up to whom he needs to do something, puts his cup of tea on the table, sits down next to it and starts talking about problems with his “swallow”. When everyone leaves for lunch, in most cases the herd instinct kicks in. Estimate how often you sat at the "round table" and just listened while colleagues (for example, a couple of designers) decide something among themselves and tell you the solution. All this time could be spent by you on creating something new.
3. I prefer to work until 2-3 am, then sleep until 10 am. Yes, I can wake up at 7:30 and be at work by 8:45, but until 14:00 I will be of no more use than secretary Katerina. And my friend goes to church in the morning to sing, and at 7:00 she is already in a working mood. Each of your colleagues has their own schedule, we are arranged that way.
4. If you are sitting at home, your colleagues have to document all the introductions to you in one way or another. That is, either in redmine, or in the mail, or, God bless him, in ICQ, but somewhere you have the text of the conversation and in it you can see exactly what you wanted to achieve from you or what decision you came to in the dispute. No “like I said to draw coffee and cookies here, not a hedgehog and an apple”!
Consequence: a remote team is more motivated to create documentation (wiki), and less likely to concentrate knowledge in one person who appears in office plankton - you can always come up and ask there.
In general, if there is motivation, working from home is extremely productive. If there is no motivation, then you can sit idle in the office. I have worked with both studios and freelancers, and I can say that sometimes office studios drag out deadlines much more godlessly than a freelancer who thinks how easy it is for me to find a replacement for him in the event of an akhtung.

Answer 2

At home, only asocial singles can work productively.
A normal person at home will be distracted from work.

Answer 3

Yes, it can, if it competes with loner offices. If we oppose 4 freelancers against a well-coordinated office team of 4 people, then there are no options, the office team, due to the coherence and refinement of work, will win both in terms of time and quality. Verified by personal experience.

Answer 4

From a business point of view, definitely, working in an office is a more reliable and professional approach.
- A remote worker can simply get lost at one moment, not get in touch and that's it. And you have deadlines.
— It is much easier to organize team work when the team works in the same office. For example, often instead of a detailed correspondence in the project management system, a tester just needs to go to the programmer's computer and poke a finger at the monitor, at the location of the bug.
— Remote work requires high self-discipline, which is not so common among programmers. The temptation is high to sleep longer, to be lazy during the day, then to sit up late, then work on the weekends. The line between work and leisure is completely blurred.
— In the office, it is much easier to organize the necessary working conditions for the employee. Those who work at home usually live with their families, and the wife / children / mother / dog distracts attention all the time and often do not understand that if you work at home, this does not mean that you can be sent to the market during the day for potatoes.
I am writing this as a person who worked as a programmer both at home and in the office, and currently manages his own company for outsourcing / outstaff software development (there are more than 10 employees in the staff, all work in the office).
I agree that in some cases hiring a remote programmer can be the best solution (for example, if you do not have enough money to hire an employee in the office), but in general, software development from home is evil.
I emphasize that all of the above applies primarily to programmers who are involved on the basis of long-term cooperation. Copywriters, translators, designers, for some reason, work much better from home, and if you have a one-time small alienated programming job, you can also hire a home performer.

Answer 5

I have lived in an office for 6 years and have been freelancing from home for the last couple of years. I tripled my productivity, started earning more and relaxing more :)

The big problems in the office for me were: - Fucking rallies - some tried to sit almost every day for half an hour, some kind of team meeting, status rallies (where they give you the floor for 5 minutes, and then you listen to some other -something nonsense - which you don’t even remember) someone else on some issue and always for an hour ... It’s hard to ignore rallies - people don’t understand. I read a bunch of books about effective books, but if you're the only one interested in it, it's a waste of time. - I believe that knowledge should be shared with people as often as possible. But some people abuse - severely. Very often they pull on some garbage. It is extremely difficult for me to refuse to help people. - In some moments of concentration, I figure out the code like crazy, but then again - often distractions. They do not even pay attention to wearing headphones, which seem to say "

I added some rules for myself and I can filter out clients by their principle. - If a client, when asked to show documents or requirements, says "let me call you on Skype and explain everything" - I immediately refuse to work with such a person. - I explain very quickly that if it takes me more than 5 minutes to answer a letter, then most likely I will answer it in a week. And in general, I keep all correspondence to a minimum, I don’t plan anything for more than a week. - I communicate with the team only in a general chat (Skype or irc) - again, I react with a delay if there are no urgent matters. Often people find a way out on their own, they need to be given a chance to think. - Almost every day I describe what I have done, I ask the client (or team) to check what I have done. Often this is not much of the functionality, so it doesn't take more than 15-30 minutes for people.

Answer 6

It really depends on the employee. And to consider the "average temperature in the hospital", in my opinion, is useless here.

If we oppose 4 freelancers against a well-coordinated office team of 4 people, then there are no options, the office team, due to the coherence and refinement of work, will win both in terms of time and quality.

How does the coherence and refinement of work correlate with the office? If this is a team, in both the first and second cases, there can be an arbitrary ratio of quality and efficiency. Or do you think that freelancers do not cooperate and do not create teams?
In how many comparisons, by the way, experience is calculated?

Answer 7

With hourly pay with control, you will not have such a question.
This is where outsourcing is much more efficient.

Answer 8

The office is more efficient. In terms of communication, motivation, labor productivity. But it is also more effective in terms of "squeezing all the juice" out of an employee. If you've seen the movie Fight Club, you've seen what office work can do to people.
You get more tired from such work, and the need to get up on an alarm clock and live according to a schedule is generally harmful and leads to fatigue, increased drowsiness, falling asleep at work and a decrease in labor productivity. Because it doesn't suit everyone.

Answer 9

As for working from home as a freelancer: I personally don’t have a family, and no one really distracts me. And if someone is distracted, freelancing is quite possible to do work somewhere in a cafe or coffee shop. About 9 months ago, I set myself the task of learning how to work in any more or less decent place with an outlet and Wi-Fi. At first I thought that they would kick me out and I would be distracted by people. After having worked productively for 5-6 hours with headphones in my ears dozens of times, I can say that freelancing outside the home is quite convenient. Pros: you choose where you want to work today, you are not distracted by the refrigerator, bed, bathroom, and so on. Cons: You need to have a mini budget for sitting in a cafe.

Answer 10

It all depends on the person and motivation. Many outsourcers simply don't have self-discipline plus distractions hinder productivity. Plus, it was written about communication above - that's right, there are a lot of cases when you need to quickly show / communicate - outsourcing loses here in terms of speed.

Answer 11

IMHO, from the experience in the office, on average, each participant in a software development project spends 50% of the working time on all sorts of conversations. We call this “synchronization of mental models”. It is known that words, timbre and intonation convey only a little less than half of the information. Therefore, it takes twice as much time to transfer information to a remote team member. Therefore, the COCOMO II industry methodology teaches us that if a project is carried out by a distributed team, then its labor intensity must be multiplied by 1.5.

Answer 12

When I worked as a programmer in the office, I did the most difficult things either late at night, staying by myself, or at home on the weekends. It so happened that all day long I unsuccessfully tried to figure out the problem, and then in the evening at home I solved everything in a couple of hours. Although the chair and monitors at work were cooler than at home.
A boring predictable routine, on the contrary, is hard to do at home, you have to force yourself harder, you want to switch to something more creative.

Answer 13

As long as I live alone, there is no difference in productivity. The minus of the office is the road with traffic jams, a lot of people. who are not busy and are constantly distracting. It may be that you came to the office, you have tasks for 3-4 hours. And 2 hours on the road, 2 hours waiting for the customer's response was wasted, because I could have stayed at home to do everything and 4 hours to do other things. But when a family appears at home, especially a large family, then you can only work in the office.
About half a year ago there was an article on Habré from a freelancer who had a separate room at home and was able to explain to his family that if he works at home, this does not mean that he is at home and can be distracted every 5 minutes to help around the house. Somehow my parents, brother and sister were visiting, I could not explain it to them in a week.
So it all depends on the conditions at home and in the office.