Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
fractional.work
Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#2Where is the Moneyball for knowledge workers?
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#3Where is the Moneyball for knowledge workers?
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Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#4[flagged]
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#5Currently I’m following the idea that it starts with good work priorization. With other words: What work shall an organization/team/individual actually execute? Which tickets shall be picked from the infinite stream of tickets? How do you know that the right tickets are picked? Unless this questions can be answered, measuring the individual performance is completely impossible in the short term. One can „work hard“ and produce a lot of code, write many tests, do many tickets with low ROI and still achieve subpar results. Thus the measure of productivity must truly capture the added value of one’s work. And there is no „one size fits all“ solution.
Long term the differences in productivity are clearly visible.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#6[flagged]
> It doesn’t work so we keep doing it because we can’t try anything different because what we are doing doesn’t work.
Saying it “doesn’t work” is a stretch, no?
The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this process are probably “good enough”.
And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the end of the day, that’s all their shareholders care about.
We won’t have meaningful change unless there’s an incentive. You think something is broken, but the key decision makers don’t agree.
Source: 10+ years in big tech
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#7[flagged]
Of course there is a better interviewing process that we know of. The US military has been using it for like a century.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#8Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#9Where is the Moneyball for knowledge workers?
Whats the incentive to share it? Disclosure is an alpha-erasing move.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#10Because it's not observable; it has to be inferred. Every employee affects the finished product through a complex web of interactions. As a latent variable, we can only hope to gain a noisy estimate.
Companies don't bother estimating worker productivity themselves. Rather they let employees make their own case, based on their work, using whatever data they can scrounge.