It's hard to take this seriously with so little time dedicated to evaluating culture, especially from a highly political company like Google which is famous for being a ball pit for gifted children at this point. If motivation matters (as suggested by the emphasis on task variety} then it matters if the path of least resistance is to yes-man our most noisey peers. Going deeper, cultural hostility explains manager-employee relationships and inter-employee relationships to a certain degree and even if it can't explain th perfectly it can predict them comfortably.
What's more, you can't get a good sense of culture impact through employee surveys like this paper is trying to do because that implies you already understand the culture in the surveyed regions/companies which does not seem to have transpired here. Evaluating the effect of perks, time obligations, etc. in isolation only serves to perpetuate whichever culture was already dominant while simultaneously failing to ask any interesting questions about why that observation is dominant. You could publish 200 papers like this one and yet without geography-centric comparisons to places like Latin America, Europe, and SEA or cross-political comparisons such as differences between American Blue and Red employees, all you're evaluating is what the dominant group in these orgs prefers.
I have no doubt this comment will be buried with downvotes and minimal replies though, because the biggest lie of all that I see perpetuated here is that software development is our can be politically neutral (easily disproven by looking into who can speak to what topics in a public company vs. a company with ties to given like the many contractors). The reason I'm saying it though is that at some point, probably after we've retired, there will be devs who aren't so drowned in money that it makes more sense for companies to pander to our prejudice and when that time comes the forerunners (from every leaning because these things are often company specific) will be in for a rude awakening as they see their work seething as the foundation for producing machinations they deem nightmarish.
Started a new position just before covid. I Spent 3 months getting access to basic systems.
Servers and access is constantly shifting. So I lose access to things all the time. Or how I get to something changes every couple of weeks.
I see other developers make a change to code, UI tweak, wait 5-15 minutes to see a change, then make another change.
If I work on something else for a couple weeks and come back the entire process of running it locally will be belke, requiring hours to fix again.
Running test suite is 15+ hour process. Deployments takes 4-12 hours.
Everyone is given 5-8 projects to work on at the same time. Collaboration is discouraged.
Productivity is nearly zero.
People were blown away that I spent two days to fix development minor changes could be seen in seconds, not minutes.
I’ve seen several teams now where any investment in speedy development was considered a waste.
Infrastructure is another odd one, seen many companies were infrastructure is completely failing, yet all effort is on building new features.
Hint clients are leaving because the product is broken. Not because of a missing feature.
What's more, you can't get a good sense of culture impact through employee surveys like this paper is trying to do because that implies you already understand the culture in the surveyed regions/companies which does not seem to have transpired here. Evaluating the effect of perks, time obligations, etc. in isolation only serves to perpetuate whichever culture was already dominant while simultaneously failing to ask any interesting questions about why that observation is dominant. You could publish 200 papers like this one and yet without geography-centric comparisons to places like Latin America, Europe, and SEA or cross-political comparisons such as differences between American Blue and Red employees, all you're evaluating is what the dominant group in these orgs prefers.
I have no doubt this comment will be buried with downvotes and minimal replies though, because the biggest lie of all that I see perpetuated here is that software development is our can be politically neutral (easily disproven by looking into who can speak to what topics in a public company vs. a company with ties to given like the many contractors). The reason I'm saying it though is that at some point, probably after we've retired, there will be devs who aren't so drowned in money that it makes more sense for companies to pander to our prejudice and when that time comes the forerunners (from every leaning because these things are often company specific) will be in for a rude awakening as they see their work seething as the foundation for producing machinations they deem nightmarish.