3 ms·

Shouldn't productivity increase mathematically when reducing number of hours? Like if you reduce everyone to 10h per week. Sales may go down from 4M to 3M but

Shouldn't productivity increase mathematically when reducing number of hours? Like if you reduce everyone to 10h per week. Sales may go down from 4M to 3M but because hours went 4x less you can still claim 300% increase in productivity. It doesn't meant anything in term of efficiency, creativity, or actual performance of the organization. I would be interested to see actual studies on this.

forbiddenvoid 5y ago
Productivity increased per week, not just per hour which is significantly different.
routerl 5y ago
You're confusing efficiency and productivity. Your example is correct but is about efficiency. In the case of Microsoft Japan, 40% more work was done in four fifths of the time, which is a greater than 40% increase in efficiency.
- elefanten 5y ago
  But that's not what they were measuring. They measured sales revenue per employee and then admitted in errata that the claim was misleading anyway since other factors also contributed to sales revenue increase.
  - routerl 5y ago
    > But that's not what they were measuring. They measured sales revenue per employee How is that not a measure of productivity?
    - elefanten 5y ago
      You can’t say 40% more work was done from their conclusions.
    - rvba 5y ago
      Sales depends mostly on sales tram ability. In software it is much easier to scale sales: the infrastructure costs when selling 1M copies and 1.4M copies are quite similar. Maybe some devops will have to spin more servers. But programmers allready did their job. Compare this to selling physical objects. If you can make 1M cars per month, you cannot easily make 1.4M per month: it requires more workers, machines, supply. Those are quite neglible in software. Also your workers can make cars 2x faster than everyone else (better productivity) but nobody will buy them, since they are poor quality
sokoloff 5y ago
That would be a 200% increase (to 300% of the prior value) in sales per labor hour.

forbiddenvoid 5y ago

Productivity increased per week, not just per hour which is significantly different.

routerl 5y ago

You're confusing efficiency and productivity. Your example is correct but is about efficiency. In the case of Microsoft Japan, 40% more work was done in four fifths of the time, which is a greater than 40% increase in efficiency.

elefanten 5y ago
But that's not what they were measuring. They measured sales revenue per employee and then admitted in errata that the claim was misleading anyway since other factors also contributed to sales revenue increase.
- routerl 5y ago
  > But that's not what they were measuring. They measured sales revenue per employee How is that not a measure of productivity?
  - elefanten 5y ago
    You can’t say 40% more work was done from their conclusions.
  - rvba 5y ago
    Sales depends mostly on sales tram ability. In software it is much easier to scale sales: the infrastructure costs when selling 1M copies and 1.4M copies are quite similar. Maybe some devops will have to spin more servers. But programmers allready did their job. Compare this to selling physical objects. If you can make 1M cars per month, you cannot easily make 1.4M per month: it requires more workers, machines, supply. Those are quite neglible in software. Also your workers can make cars 2x faster than everyone else (better productivity) but nobody will buy them, since they are poor quality

sokoloff 5y ago

That would be a 200% increase (to 300% of the prior value) in sales per labor hour.