Comment by nradov
6 months ago
Nah. It's impossible, unless you define "productivity" in such a narrow way that it ceases to be relevant to actual business value creation.
6 months ago
Nah. It's impossible, unless you define "productivity" in such a narrow way that it ceases to be relevant to actual business value creation.
You just defined it, "business value creation", from there, you narrow it down, short term vs long term, strategic vs revenue generating, and so on.
The idea that you can't measure productivity is align with people who think "economics is not science."
Nah. It's impossible to link business value creation to individual contributors. No one has ever figured out how to do this in a accurate, reliable, and repeatable way. When it comes to knowledge work, productivity can only be measured in aggregate for larger groups.
Most of economics is junk science. Very little of it is quantitatively rigorous or falsifiable in the real world.
I think it’s possible some of the time for some projects to measure how much business value an IC created.
But I also think there is no company with more than 50 software engineers employees that is able to accurately attribute business value creation to the majority of their software engineers.
Software engineers rarely pick what they work on, so in most cases you can only measure how well they meet the objectives they were assigned to work on.
And even then you can only get any kind of accuracy at the team level.
And those numbers aren’t comparable between teams because teams aren’t assigned to work on the same things.
People who think they can accurately measure things like velocity will bring out arguments based on the law of large numbers. But that only works when the number of samples is much larger than the number of variables, which is not the case for software engineering.
You can believe that economics is science. But still believe that it’s impossible to figure out how much GDP growth is attributable to each individual member of congress.
> Software engineers rarely pick what they work on, so in most cases you can only measure how well they meet the objectives they were assigned to work on.
There it goes, your other metric.
> People who think they can accurately measure things like velocity will bring out arguments based on the law of large numbers. But that only works when the number of samples is much larger than the number of variables, which is not the case for software engineering.
You can't accurately measure any coastline, but we don't stop at that.
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