Comment by godelski

  > The idea of measuring individual developer productivity is kind of absurd to me.

It is absurd to do in a lot of settings. The other day we had a similar story with the measurement of "value" just the other day[0]. I think there's been a big bureaucratic takeover where people are measuring for the sake of measuring rather than recognizing that these things are proxies and you need to be careful to ensure your proxy is properly aligned with the actual thing you want to measure.

You see this in research and academia by trying to measure by number of papers/citations/venue/novelty. You see this in the workforce with things like lines of code, story points, and any of that other bullshit. You see this with how people think about money. Like just think what a million dollars a month would mean what you __*couldn't*__ do wit that money.

The problem is that we've created scoring systems and people see the ultimate goal as maximizing their scores. This doesn't matter if the score is actually meaningful or not, but we'll sure as hell passionately argue that they do. I'll refer to my comment to [0] for more[1].

I've been calling this concept: Goodhart's Hell

The truth is that every system has noise in it. I completely understand wanting to remove all possible noise from the system, but after a certain point, attempts to remove noise are actually ignoring noise. Maybe the problem is that people don't recognize that randomness is itself a measurement of uncertainty. There is no measuring device that is without uncertainty. Embrace the noise. Remove as much as you can, but you need to embrace what is impossible to remove. You create more noise by ignoring the noise.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448860