At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home • Hacker News Board

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#201

Post by onion2k » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

jimmytucson wrote: post #165

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

This is what makes me so uncomfortable with hiring software developers. I don’t know how good of a job they’re doing, or what’s taking them so long, or whether another group of developers would do a better job faster. If I hire painters, I can tell if they’re doing a good job by looking at it. I know what’s taking them so long. They’re using slower drying drywall compound, or they’re having to mask off because they’r…

If I hire painters, I can tell if they’re doing a good job by looking at it.

It's easy to make a job look good for a day, but on some jobs if you skip the prep work, lining, filling, priming, undercoat, additional coats, clearcoat, and finishing the paint job is going to look pretty bad after a year. You can't tell how good a painter is unless you know a bit about painting things.

The same is true of software. In order to know if a developer is productive you really need to know quite a lot about the domain they're writing software for.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#202

Post by Kiro » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:29 AM UTC

Report: "WFH has made productivity go up."

HN: "Of course you're more productive. WFH is the best, I hope we never return to the office!"

Report: "WFH has made productivity go down."

HN: "Don't trust this. Productivity can't be measures."

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#203

Post by acvny » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #115

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem I want to start off by saying that I don't completely disagree with you, but all of us should take a step back and realize how an absurd of a position this is for us to be in a society. This immeasurability is inversely proportional to the tangible, real value created. You can, for example, absolutely measure to the dollar the producti…

Incorrect. A plumber can spend 10 minutes to fix a leak, but the same plumber can spend 4 hours on apparently the same leak but a slightly trickier one. The same for farm - how much of the output depends on workers and how much on the environment and other factors?

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#204

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #157

andreilys wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines of code on average is a terrible measure of productivity. I’ve solved problems with 6 lines of code that took me a week to think of. Other days I write 600 lines of code. I would argue that the former 6 lines I wrote is much more productive than the 600 lines.

For an individual, lines of code is a bad measure. Some problems are harder than other and some people do more design or leadership work. However, for the collective this all should average out.

No, the problem is that, in general, the more lines of code you have, the worse your program is. Perhaps people working at home feel less pressure to just code, and are thinking more about the problem and writing less code to solve the same problems - a massive win in productivity, which would appear as a loss by your measure.

On the other hand, perhaps people are indeed writing the same old code that they always were, just writing less of it.

So lines of code are not a good metric. Average number of features/user stories/tasks delivered may be a decent metric (at the group level, not for individual developers), as long as it doesn't become a target. Delivery VS estimate could also be OK, in the same way.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#205

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#206

Post by 1e-9 » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem.

While I do agree that many productivity metrics are useless and even counterproductive, measuring productivity in a useful way is most certainly possible. For example, sales organizations measure sales per unit time for each sales person. I doubt you will find a successful sales organization not doing this.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#207

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:43 AM UTC

r29vzg2 wrote: post #133

wsatb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events. This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse. > Don’t shit on fields you don’t…

> This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. Unless you’re in a position to actually create change, I don’t see how following every single update to an unfolding news story helps you. I am not talking about being completely ignorant. There is a saying, important news will always find you. You could…

Avoiding the news is a good recipe for becoming ignorant, and only knowing the propaganda. In a world of public relations experts, the only way to avoid this is to look for original sources that you can trust (e.g. by interacting with people who were part of the event), and/or listen to as many different news sources as you can find. You should usually avoid the bigger ones, especially the ones intended for mass consumption.

If you just find out about the world from what the NYT or Fox or WSJ write about, you only know propaganda.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#208

Post by Robin_Message » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

1e-9 wrote: post #206

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. While I do agree that many productivity metrics are useless and even counterproductive, measuring productivity in a useful way is most certainly possible. For example, sales organizations measure sales per unit time for each sales person. I doubt you will find a successful sales organization not doing this.

Even then, what if one salesperson builds up better longer term relationships (e.g. by not pushing options the customer doesn't really need) and thus their future sales will be better but their initial productivity looks poor?

Or a team player who is good at opening conversations but not closing? (I know, always be closing)

But yes, with a quantifiable and accurate and business-orientated metric, you can measure some form of productivity. It is still hard for most roles in most organisations.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#209

Post by lanevorockz » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:58 AM UTC

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

Quick correction, this problem is far from impossible. A multivariate model and about 5/10 years of data and you can easily get an answer to that.

Re: At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

#210

Post by ponker » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 7:59 AM UTC

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #115

holidayacct wrote: post #76

Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem. Microsoft spend something in excess of 3 billion dollars trying to quantify productivity in the 90s and they couldn't do it. One of my college professors worked on this exact problem for the Army in the 80s, they created a formal domain specific language for quantifying employee productivity it took them 20 years and several hundred mil…

> Never believe stories like this, measuring productivity is an impossible problem I want to start off by saying that I don't completely disagree with you, but all of us should take a step back and realize how an absurd of a position this is for us to be in a society. This immeasurability is inversely proportional to the tangible, real value created. You can, for example, absolutely measure to the dollar the producti…

This misses the mark by quite a large margin. It's hard to measure the "productivity" of an individual who worked on the polio vaccine, that doesn't mean that it was a worthless product.

The fact that productivity is hard to measure has very little to do with the value of that work, but rather the difficulty of drawing boundaries around people, objects, and time in the functioning of a complex product.

You cannot measure the value of a software engineer without assessing how their work impacted the work of other people, whether it needed refactoring in the future, whether it took into account future requirements that wouldn't be known for five years, etc. You can't even do that with plumbers! One plumber's work may fail in 10 years while the other's is going strong 20 years later, and you may have thought the first one was more "productive."