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.
Owning a share is infinitely productive.
Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
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Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#42> recursion is extremely rare in shipped code but extremely common in interviews Though not quite important to the main theme of the article, I wonder what area the author is referring to.
I guess to all the whiteboard coding with the recursion (e.g. Fibonacci sequence). On a contrary, I think it is present in many places where you have to dive into any sensible, tree like, structure. Then, it's a mess once it turns out person has no idea what recursion is.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#43What 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.
>when I say milestones, I don't mean time-based ones, which are more often than not arbitrary.
artbitrary, yes. But also what the entire business world revolves around. quarterly earning calls, monthly finances, yearly budgets. It's arbituary, but those are period they pick to determine a bunch of stuff above the product itself.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#44Why 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…
The first step of improving a process is to measure it, because only then you will know if it's improved.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#45Why 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.
> in an ephemeral way, yes.
So no. Or why not measure productivity in an ephemeral way.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
> in an ephemeral way, yes. So no. Or why not measure productivity in an ephemeral way.
Glad you asked. Because "trust" is one of the last ways companies can get around being discriminatory in at-will employment without facing lawsuits. In other words, it directly benefits those in power not to directly measure "trust", but quietly base it on the biases of any given manager.
Unless you're in some stack ranked program, lack of trust is the easiest way to be first to be laid off, or on the slower track to be put on a PiP (officially or not). Sadly and ironically enough, "productivity" is one of he few ways to counteract this bias. Having a hard trail of evidence that you met every and all goals, a hard trail that these were the goals to begin with.
I could go on about how you gain trust, and indirect trust or trust via authority, but I think you get the point.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#47Why 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…
When you need to do a job and have a certain amount of resources available you need to measure the productivity of your process. If you don't do that you'll waste your resources.
In business this means that if you have a machine that produces X widgets per hours and costs Y dollars to run, you can estimate is it worth running it at all or it's not economical to do that.
With teams of people managers/owners solve the same problem - I have a fixed amount of resources and need to allocate them properly. No measure = no good allocation = going out of business.
The reason capitalism creates more and cheaper goods that socialism is that resource allocation problem is solved by every participant in the free market (or mostly free market). Without measurement, the owners can't allocate the resources properly and they'd go out of business.
If you have worked in a team with badly performing members who don't pull their share of the load this creates imbalances in the team and the best performing members of the team leave, because they don't want to deal with the laggards.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#48Why 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…
> Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)?
Yes, absolutely. It's difficult to do this in customer surveys because you need a motivation for the customer to engage in a feedback process (e.g. a product review, or a questionnaire after a support call), and then the feedback is mostly about that specific event. But focus group research will absolutely try to measure trust either implicitly (e.g. from sentiment analysis) or using explicit questions.
I also know of at least one company that measures (or at least, tries to measure) "leadership trust" among their employees using surveys.
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#49It is quite easy. Just apply the income = productivity hypothesis that economists seem to love.
Whoever you pay the most, is the most productive person in the company. Yes, that means you, the CEO, should pay yourself the most because you are the most productive employee...
Re: Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
#50Why 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…
We measure trust all the time: everyone you work with keeps track of whether you tell them the truth and meet the commitments that you make.
People also assess your productivity and the quality of your results in deciding whether to work with you, to ask you to join their team, to hire you, etc...
I would be surprised if you don't try to assess your own productivity and the quality of the results that you deliver. Neither of these may be easy to measure but I don't think you should be ignoring them.