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To correlate with job success, you need to define and measure job success. A sub-question: How's the academic research into measuring programmer job success?
by sampo 8y ago
To correlate with job success, you need to define and measure job success. A sub-question: How's the academic research into measuring programmer job success?
- srfilipek 8y agoEasy: LOC / hour. </sarcasm>
- dominotw 8y agoI really think this is best we got so far.
- onion2k 8y agoSo the secret to being a 10X programmer is ":set tw=8" making your maximum line length 8 characters, forcing you be 10 times more productive than rival devs who're stuck at the old 80 character standard. Got it.
- RugnirViking 8y agoI think reading code deliniated into lines 8 characters code, written by somebody else, with no whitespace and single letter variable names is the punishment reserved in hell for the very worst of developers.
- d0mine 8y agoOr you can move around code creating large diffs and when asked why: just say "I'm familiarizing myself with the code" -- real story: my boss says about that person that he is the most productive programmer. It seems gaming trivial metrics works in this case.
- dominotw 8y ago1. no one will be allowed to do that if you work in a team environment. 2. No one has been able to come up with a better alternative. I wasn't implying its a prefect metric or even a reasonable one. If you really need a quantifiable metric then thats all we got.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoHard Mode: Removed LOC / hour.
- d0mine 8y agoHardest mode: non-written code
- 0xfeba 8y agoSocial-engineering your PM to remove requirements, yep.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoMy PM loves removing stuff from tickets. Most of the time, what people want isn't even what they want.
- organsnyder 8y agoOn an inverse scale, sure. Only the best coders have net-negative LOC/hour metrics.
- szatkus 8y agoThis would end up with a lot of code golf.
- organsnyder 8y agoReaching the objective as efficiently as possible... yeah, sounds about right.
- thanatropism 8y agoCode golf probably correlates with IQ.
- PorterDuff 8y agoHow about academic research into the value of academic research in programmer job success? I figure that eventually it'll be similar to the Voight-Kampff test and kept on file forever while being shared with all potential employers.
- arethuza 8y agoI think the baseline test from 2049 would be more appropriate: "Because they have to kill their own kind, they constantly need to be assessed as to whether their work is having some kind of moral impact on them'" https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Baseline_test https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Baseline_test
- eldridgea 8y agoGoogle publishes a lot of their work at https://rework.withgoogle.com/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/. Also, Google's former head of people (Lazlo Block) founded a company that is focusing on that area: https://humu.com/ https://humu.com/. While I wasn't always a fan of Google People/HR procedures while I was there, I did always appreciate the data-driven/research approach Lazlo and the People team took.
- hyperpape 8y agoHillel Wayne has been writing about this a bit on Twitter. Some threads: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560 https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560 In general, there's a lot of research, though with some weird gaps, and a lot of results (though not all) are inconclusive.
- duxup 8y agoRelated, how do you define even the type of job and compare the person hired to the job? A noob could be successful hire and not ultra productive compared to say a more experienced hire. And that doesn't account for all the places hiring / think they need / hired "rockstar" developers .... to maintain their crud app.
- jrumbut 8y agoI've always thought that surveys of team members and managers could be a pretty cheap and effective way to do this (in a research setting, where you aren't basing pay or contract renewal on it). It may not give you much in an absolute sense, but should give you a good idea of the relative ranking of programmers. Of course software engineering research in general has always been a little unimpressive because what you really need is several teams completing projects, some using method A and others using method B. This could cost millions, and would only settle the bet between methods A and B. Lacking this, we're left with the publically available research that relies on unconvincing proxies for success and very small samples. It's better than nothing but far short of what we ought to have given how important software is.
- webmaven 8y ago> This could cost millions, and would only settle the bet between methods A and B. Even worse: it would only settle the bet between methods A and B in a particular context.
- JamesBarney 8y agoUsually they look at future reviews or just ask managers how well that individual is performing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]