I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague from Georgia, who had a beautiful southern drawl. He said, "The way Ah measure Ahr Oh Ah is Ahr over Ah.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague from Georgia, who had a beautiful southern drawl. He said, "The way Ah measure Ahr Oh Ah is Ahr over Ah." Assigning productivity numbers to individual engineers is enormously difficult-- but at the level of VP of all programming, it seems simple: At the end of a quarter, you know how much you spent on programmers during that quarter. And a couple of quarters after that, you should know how much value was added. Why not calculate ROI as R over I???