
How we increased productivity with a fruit basket at work - philou
http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-increased-productivity-by-25-with-a-fruit-basket-at-work/
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rbinv
What a bunch of clickbait nonsense.

> After a few weeks, we had slashed bug fixing time, which increased
> productivity by 25%. The fruit baskets at work played a key role in this
> productivity increase!

> In the end, it increased productivity by 25%

Or, you know, maybe it was everything else you were doing differently? Such as
[http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-
kata...](http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata-to-
gain-25-percent-of-productivity-part-5/) (which he even links to in the
original post).

I'm not saying that having a fruit basket can't necessarily make people
happier and therefore more productive. But these claims are just ridiculous
and almost impossible to measure properly.

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rzzzt
Now take away the fruit basket, productivity might improve again:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

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LeonB
This is a good example of little improvements to team culture leaving to
further compounding improvements. I give it 4 apples

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mlthoughts2018
I disagree. I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing
and belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket. If I have a blind spot
in testing or bug finding because of my perspective as a developer, then my
goal is to improve that skill for myself, because I am a professional and it
matters for delivering a product to customers or stakeholders.

If anything, events like this just make me question management and think,
“these people have no idea what they’re doing... they want to satisfy some ego
drive to be praised as inventive leaders by making shit up instead of just
choosing the boring, well-known kinds of solutions.”

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lmm
> I find these types of cutesy “culture” things very infantilizing and
> belittling. I don’t do my job for a fruit basket.

This always just feels like negative-sum macho posturing to me. I'm a serious
programmer and good at my job, but of course I'd rather have a fruit basket
than not have a fruit basket.

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rishabhsagar
But does that contribute in any way to your productivity? In my experience I’d
rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like
additional training. Flashy and marketable perks like fruit basket often
unfortunately get prioritised over non sexy, but meaningful improvements and
articles such as this, don’t help.

~~~
lmm
> But does that contribute in any way to your productivity?

It contributes to my happiness, which is ultimately what I care about -
productivity is another means to the same end.

> In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more
> tangible things like additional training.

You talk about things being "prioritised" but I just don't think that matches
how these decisions are made. It's not like they're taking money out of some
fixed pool (again, at a practical-decision-making level); I see no reason to
think that fruit baskets make training less likely. (Indeed I'd say that
providing fruit baskets speaks to a willingness to offer cheap-but-effective
things, and I'd rather work for somewhere that tried to offer cheap-but-
effective training than somewhere that tried to offer expensive training).

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taneq
I bet they would have improved productivity even more by re-introducing
wolves.

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robmaister
I have mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, it's giving an incentive
to working on the "boring" stuff that devs prefer not to do, on the other
hand, it's something that can be gamed and result in poorer code quality
(patching the symptom).

Also, it seems like the company focus shifted to reducing bugs and general
code quality. That probably has something to do with the huge shift in
productivity as measured by bug count.

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mgiannopoulos
So now click-baits, sensational content have expanded to developers blog.
That’s just great. They seem like they did some good work analysing how they
spend their time and what their goals should be. What’s the need for the
nonsense?

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jacknews
So, 25% more work achieved for the company and it's shareholders/owners, have
a banana?

