Here's the thing, it's unmeasurable. Most of software is invisible, and would take a tremendous amount of effort to analyze well (for quality, value, etc.), on

Here's the thing, it's unmeasurable. Most of software is invisible, and would take a tremendous amount of effort to analyze well (for quality, value, etc.), only a fraction of which is ever expended in the moment (if at all). The reality is that good people work under poor conditions and do poorly, other people get burnt out, other people with talent "evaporate" out of the team/org/company because they are fed up or what-have-you. All of this degrades the ability of the team/company to execute on difficult projects well, but that is incredibly hard to measure objectively. Especially since every iteration and every project tends to have its own unique qualities which make direct comparisons to previous projects non-trivial. That leaves only subjective judgments. People may look around and ask "why can't we execute as well as we used to?" but unless it's a drastic difference it may not be very noticeable, if at all. And that's the thing, objective measures are nearly impossible to come by, and a lot of the data for subjective measures is not well known beyond only a handful of people. Software is fundamentally a creative endeavor, and this shows the most during the development process. Judging the quality of a company overall from year to year then becomes similar to judging the quality of, say, a band or an actor or a comedian. Debating which, say, Smashing Pumpkins album was the best is fundamentally similar to judging whether the developing capability at, say, google (or microsoft or facebook or amazon) was better in 2012 or 2010 or what-have-you. And this is even difficult to judge over long periods (say, time slices of an entire decade) when looking back years after the fact. It's essentially impossible in the moment, especially in micro-cosm. All of which is to say, there's no sure, objective way to tell whether you're getting 1.5x well-rested workers worth of work, 2x, 10x, 0.5x, 0x, -1x, or -5x. All you know for sure is that they're putting in more hours or "crushing" more bugs, so you focus on the metrics you do have even if they are bad metrics and could lead you to make all of the wrong choices.