Comment by Joel_Mckay

"measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers"

The author has obviously never tried to build anything non-derivative in a team. This metric only identifies the noisiest inexperienced programmers, that go through other peoples work... like a monkey on crack throws its poo. These folks are often successful in business, because anyone that actually grasps real workmanship is already busy. The main problem is meritocracy eventually fails, as someone biased must choose what constitutes "good" work. Thus, a pseudo-Technocrat just follows foolish idealism with extra steps... and becomes a Marketer in time.

The truth is "all software is terrible, but some of it is useful..." depending on the end use-case.

Happy computing, =)