Comment by rcxdude

>Could you make an effort to explain how, or at the very least link to some reasoning? Otherwise your comment is basically the equivalent of “nuh-uh”, which doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the discussion.

You can look at the kind of work they're doing, how effective their solutions are, and how long it takes them to do it. That's the basics of it across a wide range of professions. Now, there's no one-size-fits-all metric or formula you can just calculate based on objective facts for most of this, because the work is more varied than e.g. factory work, but it's also not impossible to make the comparison, if you actually understand the work reasonably and you use judgement.

In the case of this study, because the assignment of the comparison they were doing was random, then just measuring time to completion across a range of tasks is a perfectly reasonable metric, because there's nothing to really bias the outcome, just a lot of factors that add noise instead. But it is worth noting that the result is a very broad average, and there is likely a very complicated distribution of details underneath, which is much harder to measure.