I read quite a bit about measurable programmer productivity in the 90's because it was an interest of mine. Basicly the studies were worthless. Professional p

I read quite a bit about measurable programmer productivity in the 90's because it was an interest of mine. Basicly the studies were worthless. Professional programmers were too expensive, so CS undergraduates were used. As you can imagine there are 10x differences in programmer experience among undergraduates. When my son was interviewing colleges a decade or so ago, we sat down and estimated that he had written about 40,000 lines of code in high school, mostly professionally and mostly hard stuff, like video codecs, mone was easy stuff like html or php. Some of you have done that. Some of his classmates had done some basic a summer or two before. Well there is at least 10x that he could easily maintain. 10 years after college there are still 10x programmers, but things are much moir even. The bottom line? Studies using a group of undergraduates on a day-long project are worthless. The other thing I have seen are efforts to measure professional programmers via time sheets, even had to do it myself, usually in the guise of getting us to produce more reliable estimates. Not more accurate estimates, but more reliable in the sense that Jack is always off by 4x while Jill is consistently off by 1.5x. These efforts usually died because programmers resisted the hassle. Other measurements have been equally worthless. Measure by lines of code? You get lots of blank line and comments. I have even worked on projects that required 2 pages of comment for 5 lines of code.