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> You can't measure any productivity that has any cognitive component. So you're saying that it's impossible to measure developer productivity at all, since it
by khazhoux 3y ago
> You can't measure any productivity that has any cognitive component.
So you're saying that it's impossible to measure developer productivity at all, since it's cognitive work? Strong disagree.
All of us here that work with other developers know that some of their peers get more done than others. Or conversely, that there's a few in the team who don't seem to get much done. The minute you make even that simple assessment, you've measured productivity.
One of the jobs of eng managers is to then make this measurement as accurately, realistically, and fairly as possible. This guides bonuses and raises, which should reflect people's contributions.
I'm not defending McKinsey's proposal here, but I agree with the general notion that it's possible to measure productivity and this is something management should always be doing.
- Scarblac 3y agoBut not very precisely. I know who is a lot better than others and who are a lot worse, but the rest are all in the pretty large group that is somewhere in the middle. Especially because there are also skill differences and the differences in job title and salary that come with that. So the level of difficulty of the work people get to do is also different, and so on.
- khazhoux 3y agoCorrect. It's brutally hard to measure with precision, in part because the work we do is so multi-dimensional. But it's not too difficult to divide people into at least three groups, of low, high, everyone-else.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoYet I've seen plenty of companies that get that completely wrong. They will fire the most productive member of the team without realising what they have done. The problem is people realise they can gain as much from playing political games as they can from improving productivity. Once that starts everything goes to shit.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoEven if you couldn't measure productivity exactly, it would be astonishing if you couldn't at least slap some kind of statistical distribution shape on it based off qualitative aspects of the work. Mathematicians have done it before.
- boxed 3y agoIt doesn't really work though. It's like measuring soccer based on goals or passes or some crazy shit. That's not how this works at all.
- khazhoux 3y agoYou’re saying there’s no conceivable way to discern which soccer players are better than others?? I don’t understand your position. Is it that all developers are equally productive, or that they do vary in productivity but it is immeasurable, an æther, with literally zero signals one could possibly mine to see how valuable a developer is to the team?
- boxed 3y agoTeam value is about bringing unique skills that can be a force multiplier. Measuring individual performance is antithetical to this very idea. Soccer is a good metaphor because it's EASY to measure/see the value a good player that does not shoot a lot of goals make. In programming this is not the case. It's certainly the case that managers that want hard numbers and don't know how to code won't be able to understand the situation at all. This is why this McKinsley nonsense is so dangerous.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoOr like modeling basketball games as random walks? https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2825 https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2825
- boxed 3y agoPeer review isn't measuring in this context. And often the value is hard to understand. I thought one guy on my team was clearly weaker than the rest... until I realized what he did that no one else did, which turns out freed up the rest of the team to do stuff we were great at. "Better" isn't linear. It can multiply, and it can be highly dependent on the rest of the team.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago> until I realized what he did that no one else did, which turns out freed up the rest of the team Can you elaborate?