Well-being and Productivity of Software Professionals during a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to impose movement restrictions on their citizens. Although critical to reducing the virus' reproduction rate, these restrictions come with far-reaching social and economic consequences. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these restrictions on an individual level among software engineers currently working from home. Although software professionals are accustomed to working with digital tools in their day-to-day work, the abrupt and enforced work-from-home context has resulted in an unprecedented scenario for the software engineering community. In a two-wave longitudinal study (N = 192), we covered over 50 psychological, social, situational, and physiological factors that have previously been associated with well-being or productivity. Examples include anxiety, distractions, psychological and physical needs, office set-up, stress, and work motivation. This design allowed us to identify those variables that explain unique variance in well-being and productivity. Results include (1) the quality of social contacts predicted positively, and stress predicted an individual's well-being negatively when controlling for other variables consistently across both waves; (2) boredom and distractions predicted productivity negatively; (3) productivity was less strongly associated with all predictor variables at time two compared to time one, suggesting that software engineers adapted to the lockdown situation over time; and (4) the longitudinal study did not provide evidence that any predictor variable causal explained variance in well-being and productivity. Overall, we conclude that working from home was <em>per se</em> not a significant challenge for software engineers. Our study can assess the effectiveness of current work-from-home and general well-being and productivity support guidelines and provide tailored insights for software professionals.新冠疫情（COVID-19 pandemic）迫使全球各国政府对本国公民实施出行限制措施。尽管这类限制对降低病毒传播速率至关重要，但也带来了影响深远的社会与经济后果。本研究聚焦于当前居家办公的软件工程师群体，探究出行限制对其个体层面产生的影响。尽管软件行业从业者日常工作中已习惯依托数字工具开展工作，但突如其来的强制居家办公场景，仍为软件工程领域带来了前所未有的局面。本研究开展了两波纵向追踪研究（样本量N=192），涵盖了此前与幸福感或工作绩效相关的50余项心理、社会、情境及生理层面的影响因素，具体包括焦虑、干扰因素、心理与生理需求、办公环境布置、压力以及工作动机等。该研究设计使得我们能够识别出可单独解释幸福感与工作绩效变异量的变量。研究结果如下：(1) 在两波数据中均控制其他变量的前提下，社交联系质量对个体幸福感存在正向预测作用，而压力则对其存在负向预测作用；(2) 倦怠与干扰因素对工作绩效存在负向预测作用；(3) 相较于第一波数据，第二波数据中工作绩效与所有预测变量的关联强度均有所减弱，这表明软件工程师随时间推移逐渐适应了封控状态；(4) 本纵向研究未发现任何预测变量可对幸福感与工作绩效的变异量做出因果性解释的证据。总体而言，本研究得出结论：居家办公本身并不会对软件工程师构成显著挑战。本研究可用于评估现行居家办公政策以及通用幸福感与工作绩效支持指南的有效性，并可为软件行业从业者提供针对性的实践参考。