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You can say this about any discipline. The root of the issue is that productivity for productivity's sake is meaningless, and it makes no sense to measure produ

You can say this about any discipline. The root of the issue is that productivity for productivity's sake is meaningless, and it makes no sense to measure productivity as a general property when outputs vary. A tire factory has a distinct, singular goal: produce tires. It does this continually. Productivity is meaningful, but only in relation to a target that is typically specified by externalities (e.g. amount of demand) A software company is usually not in the business of producing consumable commodities so this kind of measurement does not make sense. It can make sense to measure productivity during a period for delivering a particular piece of software within a given time bound, but once it's delivered, productivity becomes meaningless. You always need to understand productivity in relation to some purpose and I don't know how these knuckleheads who think this abstract idea is basically like a concrete measurable essence, like mass, or liquid, got leadership positions.

thuanao 2y ago
Seems to me you’re talking about measuring software. Once we pick a measure though, we can calculate output/input (productivity). Imagine two people tasked with producing the same software, or software satisfying the same requirements or test suite. What would you call the person who produces it faster? More productive? Measuring software in financial terms or lines of code might not be the right measurement of software in all situations, but surely we can measure time and cost to produce software or software that satisfies equivalent requirements.
- taberiand 2y ago
  Depends in the coming months and years which was more stable, maintainable and extensible.
- hammock 2y ago
  You’re responding to the headline, not the article. The article has a plainly stated thesis: “Even if it could be measured, productivity in software does not approximate business value in any meaningful way”
  - theamk 2y ago
    The article contains this sentence, yes, but the rest of the text does not support it. The article argues that lines-of-code is bad metric, and no one argues about this. thuanao proposes measuring "number of completed projects", and I think it's a pretty good metric in some situations which don't involve long-term maintenance. One example I can come up with is data science: two engineers are given identical requirements to ingest the data (once) and calculate certain metrics. If the assignments are identical, we can calculate and compare their productivity, in "projects/month"
    - lucianbr 2y ago
      Long-term maintenance is a confounding factor of course. People sometimes write software faster with the downside that it wil be harder to maintain. So remove the confounding factor (at the same time removing most projects we would like to apply this to) and it becomes an easy problem? But there are many confounding factors. Your data science project results will be different (different metric values outputed) and you don't know which one is correct, or closer to correct. Now how does the "projects/month" number look? Or maybe one of the engineers uses way more compute-hours for getting the job done. Their projects/month number is better, but is that really a better outcome? Compute is not free. By the time you remove most confounding factors, the productivity measure will only apply to an insignificant number of projects.
Buttons840 2y ago
Isn't the output, the singular goal, always money? (As sad as that may be.)
- deepsun 2y ago
  Money is the measure of usefulness. By the way, why suddenly the money=bad sentiment is so popular? I thought USSR example loudly showed us what happens when people think that money is evil.
  - musicale 2y ago
    When companies focus on profit at the expense of all other goals, the result is typically disadvantageous to customers, employees, and society at large. See also: crapification; financialization; parasitic private equity I can't speak for HN, but I imagine some readers are more interested in the benefits of cool technology beyond putting more money in the pockets of investors and management.
    - deepsun 2y ago
      > When companies focus on profit at the expense of all other goals, the result is typically disadvantageous to customers, employees, and society at large. I grew up in USSR and saw with my own eyes what happens when personal profit is not the #1 focus. Yes, _commercial_ companies should also focus on everything else as well, but profit must be #1. And the society steer the businesses towards good things by implementing laws that businesses must follow. Commercial corporations _exists_ to make money to shareholders. It's written in laws and company bylaws. That's exactly what society decided commercial companies should do. If a _commercial_ company puts something else before profits -- it can be sued by shareholders (lawsuits follow laws, aka boundaries put by society). And by the way, we already have framework to do your idea: companies can register as "non-profit" or "public benefit". So your suggestion is easily implemented today by forbidding commercial companies and only allowing non-profits or public benefit.
    - lanstin 2y ago
      That works out ok as long as they are one of a large numbers of producers, competing equally, without monopoly power or excessive physical power, for a large number of consumers free to Ursula their own best interest; a certain amount of information symmetry is also a necessary axiom. If instead you have a small number of monopolies with legislative capture, then you need them to be virtuous.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

thuanao 2y ago

Seems to me you’re talking about measuring software. Once we pick a measure though, we can calculate output/input (productivity). Imagine two people tasked with producing the same software, or software satisfying the same requirements or test suite. What would you call the person who produces it faster? More productive? Measuring software in financial terms or lines of code might not be the right measurement of software in all situations, but surely we can measure time and cost to produce software or software that satisfies equivalent requirements.

taberiand 2y ago
Depends in the coming months and years which was more stable, maintainable and extensible.
hammock 2y ago
You’re responding to the headline, not the article. The article has a plainly stated thesis: “Even if it could be measured, productivity in software does not approximate business value in any meaningful way”
- theamk 2y ago
  The article contains this sentence, yes, but the rest of the text does not support it. The article argues that lines-of-code is bad metric, and no one argues about this. thuanao proposes measuring "number of completed projects", and I think it's a pretty good metric in some situations which don't involve long-term maintenance. One example I can come up with is data science: two engineers are given identical requirements to ingest the data (once) and calculate certain metrics. If the assignments are identical, we can calculate and compare their productivity, in "projects/month"
  - lucianbr 2y ago
    Long-term maintenance is a confounding factor of course. People sometimes write software faster with the downside that it wil be harder to maintain. So remove the confounding factor (at the same time removing most projects we would like to apply this to) and it becomes an easy problem? But there are many confounding factors. Your data science project results will be different (different metric values outputed) and you don't know which one is correct, or closer to correct. Now how does the "projects/month" number look? Or maybe one of the engineers uses way more compute-hours for getting the job done. Their projects/month number is better, but is that really a better outcome? Compute is not free. By the time you remove most confounding factors, the productivity measure will only apply to an insignificant number of projects.

Buttons840 2y ago

Isn't the output, the singular goal, always money? (As sad as that may be.)

deepsun 2y ago
Money is the measure of usefulness. By the way, why suddenly the money=bad sentiment is so popular? I thought USSR example loudly showed us what happens when people think that money is evil.
- musicale 2y ago
  When companies focus on profit at the expense of all other goals, the result is typically disadvantageous to customers, employees, and society at large. See also: crapification; financialization; parasitic private equity I can't speak for HN, but I imagine some readers are more interested in the benefits of cool technology beyond putting more money in the pockets of investors and management.
  - deepsun 2y ago
    > When companies focus on profit at the expense of all other goals, the result is typically disadvantageous to customers, employees, and society at large. I grew up in USSR and saw with my own eyes what happens when personal profit is not the #1 focus. Yes, _commercial_ companies should also focus on everything else as well, but profit must be #1. And the society steer the businesses towards good things by implementing laws that businesses must follow. Commercial corporations _exists_ to make money to shareholders. It's written in laws and company bylaws. That's exactly what society decided commercial companies should do. If a _commercial_ company puts something else before profits -- it can be sued by shareholders (lawsuits follow laws, aka boundaries put by society). And by the way, we already have framework to do your idea: companies can register as "non-profit" or "public benefit". So your suggestion is easily implemented today by forbidding commercial companies and only allowing non-profits or public benefit.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    That works out ok as long as they are one of a large numbers of producers, competing equally, without monopoly power or excessive physical power, for a large number of consumers free to Ursula their own best interest; a certain amount of information symmetry is also a necessary axiom. If instead you have a small number of monopolies with legislative capture, then you need them to be virtuous.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]