Comment by ncallaway
5 years ago
What about the general counsel of an in-house legal team?
Surely they care about their underlying activities and not just number of legal hours worked, right?
I have to believe there is a legal team somewhere in the world that is measured on productivity beyond just "number of billable hours" generated.
I imagine an in-house team is being paid a salary or a retainer, in which case their work hours are moot. (Not a lawyer, so I could be wrong.)
I think the problem is the word "productivity". When we say that word, we're implicitly suggested there's a simple integer or decimal that can capture whether a person's wages are money well spent or not. For most professions, programming included, I am highly skeptical of the existence or even potential for such a number.
Sure, I wasn't disagreeing with your overall point. I was just pushing back on the last sentence:
> But lawyers? They're in the business of selling time in 15 minute increments. Their productivity is simple to measure in this respect.
I don't think all lawyers are in that business. There are plenty of in-house counsel that aren't in that business. Just as there are plenty of engineers and software developers that _are_ in the business of selling time in 15 minute increments.
I just don't think the productivity question actually breaks down along professional lines, but rather on business model lines (which, again, I think we're in agreement about your main point)
I was going to say "I didn't say all", but you're right, I didn't qualify. I meant the majority of lawyers, which I think is still accurate.
I also agree it doesn't break down along professional lines. Just used lawyers as an example, but I shoulda been clearer about my intent.
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Can you represent all the values in an equation of two variables using only a single variable? Only if the two are completely dependent (and therefore its actually an equation of just one variable). If the 2nd variable contains any information, its an impossible ask (and therefore the worth of people can only be boiled down to "productivity" if literally every measurable dimension of worth is 100% dependent on productivity).
> I imagine an in-house team is being paid a salary or a retainer, in which case their work hours are moot
I would not call it moot, but opportunity cost - and opportunity cost is very hard to measure. Technical debt is similar.
If you have current lawsuites to handle and avoid cost, their hours are better spend doing that than dishes. If you have future law suites to avoid... that get's even more tricky.
I meant "moot" only in so far as it's a useful measure of productivity.
If the hours aren't tied to either the cost or the price, then I don't know how they can be tied to productivity in an economic sense.