Asking a software engineer to be more productive is akin to asking a mechanical engineer to be more productive. What does that end up looking like? More useless blueprints? It turns out when you ask software engineers to just crank out code, you just get lots of code.
There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
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Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#12I'm not sure I follow. So you failed to measure software productivity in lines of code, therefore it follows that "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity"? Don't you think that giving up after n=1 attempts at measuring software productivity might be a tad too fast to draw a generalized claim of impossibility? I might argue the real lesson learned is "Lines of Code are Not a Measure of Productivity in an Isola…
Ok, but then what is a way to do it?
The text gives an example to the core problem, and to argue differently requires thinking around it.
In practice. I’ve seen many attempts at measuring productivity, but once you dig into them, you see they are just abstraction mechanisms above something that is similar to lines of code.
I have yet to see an idea that sidesteps the core issue described in this post. Also, it applies to many types of work, and software is not unique in any way.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#13Sure there is. It's a ratio of inputs to outputs.. even in the example the inputs and outputs are measurable. The only thing this article gets at is that engineers may not know how to calculate their own productivity; but it doesn't means it's not calculable.
> It's a ratio of inputs to outputs.. even in the example the inputs and outputs are measurable.
But reality is never that clear cut. How’s the ratio look when:
- Peter goes to the park and the breakthrough doesn’t come?
- Or it comes 3 weeks later?
- Or he deletes 100 lines of code and introduces a new bug?
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#14You could always look at things in a more abstract way ;)
From one point of view, the users of the software are supposed to enjoy so much of a productivity increase that it's not supposed to matter if the coders are as productive as they could be or not.
Give or take a few hundred percent at least.
I realize that most people who've been to business school still aren't going to develop the needed acumen to handle a situation like this.
Too many times the only training retained is a knee-jerk over-reaction to a fraction of a percent :\
Ever see one of these "leaders" have a cow and it was as stupid as it could have possibly been?
I'm confident there are still some natural leaders that can thrive without worrying about every ounce of nose to the grindstone for their staff.
Some things you just can't fix.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#15And yet somehow, software developers are doing something that's worth paying them a salary. And it's not always impossible to tell if someone's being held back at a lower salary band than they should be, or was promoted into a salary band that's higher than they're able to keep up with.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#16And yet somehow, software developers are doing something that's worth paying them a salary. And it's not always impossible to tell if someone's being held back at a lower salary band than they should be, or was promoted into a salary band that's higher than they're able to keep up with.
Yep it’s just nonsense. If it’s hard to define or measure I guess it doesn’t exist?
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#17Yay Ben Rady. He has a great podcast with Matt Godbolt (who made Compiler Explorer) called Two's Complement.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#18You can say this about any discipline. The root of the issue is that productivity for productivity's sake is meaningless, and it makes no sense to measure productivity as a general property when outputs vary . A tire factory has a distinct, singular goal: produce tires. It does this continually. Productivity is meaningful, but only in relation to a target that is typically specified by externalities (e.g. amount of d…
Seems to me you’re talking about measuring software. Once we pick a measure though, we can calculate output/input (productivity).
Imagine two people tasked with producing the same software, or software satisfying the same requirements or test suite. What would you call the person who produces it faster? More productive?
Measuring software in financial terms or lines of code might not be the right measurement of software in all situations, but surely we can measure time and cost to produce software or software that satisfies equivalent requirements.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#19I'm not sure I follow. So you failed to measure software productivity in lines of code, therefore it follows that "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity"? Don't you think that giving up after n=1 attempts at measuring software productivity might be a tad too fast to draw a generalized claim of impossibility? I might argue the real lesson learned is "Lines of Code are Not a Measure of Productivity in an Isola…
Ok, but then what is a way to do it? The text gives an example to the core problem, and to argue differently requires thinking around it. In practice. I’ve seen many attempts at measuring productivity, but once you dig into them, you see they are just abstraction mechanisms above something that is similar to lines of code. I have yet to see an idea that sidesteps the core issue described in this post. Also, it applie…
profit generated I think is the high level one, and then you want to dig from there into how much the software development contributed to this.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#20And yet somehow, software developers are doing something that's worth paying them a salary. And it's not always impossible to tell if someone's being held back at a lower salary band than they should be, or was promoted into a salary band that's higher than they're able to keep up with.
Yeah, these complaints are always so duplicitous. Somehow, it’s impossible to measure programmer productivity when it’s time for accountability or professional standards, but not when it’s time to assign annual bonuses.