This misses the mark by quite a large margin. It's hard to measure the "productivity" of an individual who worked on the polio vaccine, that doesn't mean that i

This misses the mark by quite a large margin. It's hard to measure the "productivity" of an individual who worked on the polio vaccine, that doesn't mean that it was a worthless product. The fact that productivity is hard to measure has very little to do with the value of that work, but rather the difficulty of drawing boundaries around people, objects, and time in the functioning of a complex product. You cannot measure the value of a software engineer without assessing how their work impacted the work of other people, whether it needed refactoring in the future, whether it took into account future requirements that wouldn't be known for five years, etc. You can't even do that with plumbers! One plumber's work may fail in 10 years while the other's is going strong 20 years later, and you may have thought the first one was more "productive."