  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 who were working
from home. Although software professionals are accustomed to working with
digital tools, but not all of them remotely, 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, coping strategies,
psychological and physical needs, office set-up, stress, and work motivation.
This design allowed us to identify the variables that explained 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) longitudinal analyses did not provide
evidence that any predictor variable causal explained variance in well-being
and productivity. Overall, we conclude that working from home was per se not a
significant challenge for software engineers.
