Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

It’s easy to measure productivity. Take all the profits and divide by all the hours worked.

What is HARD is to come up with endless rationals for why some people get way more that others.

We all have the same productivity? Nice!

> Interviews will transition to be more real-world scenarios, perhaps within the customer's actual codebase, addressing a genuine problem the customer faces—possibly even compensating the interviewee for their time

The mechanics of this idea suck for everybody.

Sometimes you have a candidate who is up to speed on your stack or one of its dependencies and can go from idea to implementation in a short time period but otherwise the math doesn't work.

A week of time with a mentor for one day over that time is probably enough to do a 2 day task if there are no difficulties when you consider lack of knowledge of the code base and interfacing with a new code environment.

So best case scenario you pay 3x for a feature whose mental state won't stick around and the interviewer has to find time to do a week of work while juggling their existing job (which could be job searching if nothing else).

You could say "but you would hire them after" but if we are talking about that late in the process probationary periods make more sense.

If you aren't sure they are a good fit (say 50% certainty) overpaying for a potential solution is bad and then wasting that much time on a solution also doesn't make sense.

That is why most practical things are less than a day of effort and not impactful on the product to avoid weirdness around NDAs/Copyright/proper payment.

And if you think meaningful work happens more often than every two days I wonder what software company you are working for... Breaking down tasks to 1 hour slots isn't what I would call a good use of resources...

Measuring productivity is silly. Measure results.

Here's my desired review:

Entire team goes around and answers the question: who do you want to leave? Two strikes get another chance. Three strikes and they're gone.

Same with the boss.

Keep their job or replace em? More than three say replace the level up does a panel with the three.

During our last layoff the question for the managers was "if you could drop any headcount who would it be?"

We lost about 8% from that. Everyone I talked to said they were happy that the layoff got rid of the bad apples they knew.

If the US military has such a good interviewing process then how do we keep ending up with generals who lose wars? Back during WW2 they fired or promoted officers based primarily on battlefield performance, which eventually worked pretty well for eliminating the incompetent.