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Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

fractional.work

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Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#31

Post by Nasrudith »

Putting aside the obvious Goodhart's Law implication productivity isn't just based off of the "components" be they human or otherwise but also the fundamental goals which control the end product.

If I was an utterly mad billionaire who believed that I could hire top software talent and have them attempt to store physical objects in data. Not 'encode the schematics' or even 'encode the complete physical details' but such that it was possible to generate some hidden combination. Such an endevour would not be productive but the fault doesn't lie in the employees.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#32

Post by iraqmtpizza »

nradov wrote: post #19
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is a better interviewing process that we know of. The US military has been using it for like a century.

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.

Promotions and demotions are not the result of an interview process. To make general you need decades of military experience and decisions are highly political. Because war is highly political. Generals can't win if the politicians demand the impossible i.e. use guns to turn Afghanistan into a feminist non-tribal nationalist democracy without settling large numbers of Westerners there. Any educated and ethical general would resign before committing to take on such a mission for the president.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#33

Post by nine_zeros »

wilde wrote: post #30
nine_zeros wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it exists. Lines of code, number of commits, number of documents and other such BS uncorrelated with actual work. Imagine how poor management must be to think more lines of code == more revenue.

They are correlated until you admit to using them in the performance process. Then they’re far too easy to game and become useless. What we haven’t found is an adversary-resistant measure of productivity.

They are absolutely not correlated. Engineers often spend some quarters investigating and fixing scaling issues. This work does not need to a high number of locs.

If your work is merely adding some feature factory or bug fixes, maybe there is a correlation.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#34

Post by sarabande »

I like the article's premise. I would like some argument for why we'd suddenly get better at measuring something that has escaped us for at least 80 years when knowledge work became more common.

> My suspicion is that [...] there will be a surge in our capacity to measure and evaluate real-life work performance.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#35

Post by quickthrower2 »

aeternum wrote: post #23
pcmaffey wrote: post #16

Why do we need to measure productivity? No one seems to ask that question. To me it seems that trying to measure the individual (people) parts of a system in some quasi-reproducable and transitive way does more harm to the total output of the system than good. Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)? If we relinquish individual productivity from our “measure all the things so we can improve them” obses…

So would you just fire the entire team if a product does poorly? Many individuals don't like startups because of this risk, most startup only get 1-2 chances to get productivity right. Very few waste time measuring productivity.

Option 1 - Don't measure and hope

Option 2 - Measure

Option 3 - Use judgement

We undervalue qualitative measurements when talking about this stuff. But in real life it is all there is. If you did everything with a measuring tape, you could do nothing (not even walk to your car!). If you care about nothing and close your eyes, things will get disorganized and chaotic and out of control.

This doesn't mean measure nothing, but don't try to get some perfect measure of productivity. At least not in creative work like software development.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#36

Post by latency-guy2 »

rhelz wrote: post #11

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.

If that's how we're getting paid, I think its time to fire all junior devs at the least, and then get onto the slackers and people who don't really do their job

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#37

Post by bmitc »

What even is productivity?

I think two questions are only needed: are people, teams, and organizations working on what they are supposed to be working on on the scale of weeks to months? Are they hitting acceptable milestones? And when I say milestones, I don't mean time-based ones, which are more often than not arbitrary.

Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?

#40

Post by johnnyanmac »

pcmaffey wrote: post #16

Why do we need to measure productivity? No one seems to ask that question. To me it seems that trying to measure the individual (people) parts of a system in some quasi-reproducable and transitive way does more harm to the total output of the system than good. Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)? If we relinquish individual productivity from our “measure all the things so we can improve them” obses…

>Why do we need to measure productivity? No one seems to ask that question.

because the people asking the questions aren't the ones who actually do the work. And timelines are everything to those people (which admitedly falls behind a lot in software due to the nature of the work).

>Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)?

in an ephemeral way, yes.

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