3 ms·

No offense but reading this comment with the utmost attempt at interpreting it in good faith, it kind of sounds like you're just going off of vibes and can't ac

by jchw 2y ago

No offense but reading this comment with the utmost attempt at interpreting it in good faith, it kind of sounds like you're just going off of vibes and can't actually quantify productivity any more than anyone else can. Otherwise... How exactly are you quantifying it? If you had to show your work, could you?

johnfn 2y ago
I dunno, the opposite side seems equally absurd to me. Do you work at a software company? Do you have coworkers? Are you honestly telling me that, gun to your head, you couldn't say that some are more productive and some are less? That if you had to choose a co-founder for your next startup, that you would have NO idea where to begin, that any of them would be equally as good as the next?
- jchw 2y ago
  I mean look, some people seem to be extremely productive, and sure, I could say that those people are almost surely more productive than others. It's still genuinely very hard to quantify if those people are actually vastly more productive, or if it just looks like that because they produce more obvious artifacts of their productivity. Hell, what is productivity, is it more productive to fix 1000 bugs or to be the tech lead on a product that reaches 1 million ARR? Does it matter what bugs? I stand by what I said, whether people like it or not. Including the part about going off vibes. Please explain how this "you can just kind of tell" mentality is not literally just going off of vibes? (And I wouldn't choose a cofounder only based on productivity, anyways. I'm not even sure that would be the main criteria.)
  - johnfn 2y ago
    How would you choose a cofounder? I would call whatever metric you use to determine "would that person be a good cofounder" productivity. (OK, sure, let's narrow it down and say that you were tasked with choosing a purely technical cofounder; perhaps in this hypothetical you're helping your non-technical friend find one?) Do you still believe you couldn't do better than chance?
    - jchw 2y ago
      Well, a lot of the factors explicitly have nothing to do with general productivity at all, such as alignment. The goal with regards to selecting for productivity would be "someone who seems productive enough" but getting hung up on exactly how productive feels like a mistake, as aside from being unquantifiable, that isn't going to be the only or probably even main factor that decides the fate of the endeavor. Productivity is not the most challenging problem in software development. In my opinion, as far as factors for success for a technology endeavor goes, even overall technical competence winds up factoring in fairly low at the end of the day. What's important is meeting the threshold you need, not getting as high of a score as possible. I should clarify that I actually agree with you if what you're saying is that the best measure of productivity we have is literally just going off your gut, but my argument is that this gut feeling is terrible. This is in large part because humans are biased, our gut feelings are swayed by things that simply shouldn't factor in. We tend to have more positive opinions of people that we think are like us and we sometimes wind up having negative opinions of someone based on stupid things like disagreeing with them on something that is ultimately irrelevant to whether or not they are productive. And to me, the ultimate nail in the coffin is really in the question of what really constitutes productivity. Productivity is supposed to measure the efficiency of producing something, which already has pitfalls in and of itself when dealing with things that do have discrete, measurable indicators of progress, but programming doesn't, it's not even always obvious if progress is forward or backward sometimes. What's most important, performance optimizations, disaster planning, features, robustness, minimizing resource utilization? The best answer you can generally say is "It depends," and moreover, everyone will have a different set of competencies they're best at, so a person doesn't really have some single "productivity value" you could summarize them with. Yet, all of those things are pretty important for any serious technology organization, so you would want people with a variety of different affinities. At that point, it starts to beg the question of whether or not attempting to directly measure software productivity is a worthwhile endeavor. I'd argue not.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        I suppose the question is: can you supply a word you would use when deciding on who to hire for a technical role? Does anyone off the street contribute the same amount of that word, or would you be selective?

by jchw 2y ago

johnfn 2y ago

I dunno, the opposite side seems equally absurd to me. Do you work at a software company? Do you have coworkers? Are you honestly telling me that, gun to your head, you couldn't say that some are more productive and some are less? That if you had to choose a co-founder for your next startup, that you would have NO idea where to begin, that any of them would be equally as good as the next?

jchw 2y ago
I mean look, some people seem to be extremely productive, and sure, I could say that those people are almost surely more productive than others. It's still genuinely very hard to quantify if those people are actually vastly more productive, or if it just looks like that because they produce more obvious artifacts of their productivity. Hell, what is productivity, is it more productive to fix 1000 bugs or to be the tech lead on a product that reaches 1 million ARR? Does it matter what bugs? I stand by what I said, whether people like it or not. Including the part about going off vibes. Please explain how this "you can just kind of tell" mentality is not literally just going off of vibes? (And I wouldn't choose a cofounder only based on productivity, anyways. I'm not even sure that would be the main criteria.)
- johnfn 2y ago
  How would you choose a cofounder? I would call whatever metric you use to determine "would that person be a good cofounder" productivity. (OK, sure, let's narrow it down and say that you were tasked with choosing a purely technical cofounder; perhaps in this hypothetical you're helping your non-technical friend find one?) Do you still believe you couldn't do better than chance?
  - jchw 2y ago
    Well, a lot of the factors explicitly have nothing to do with general productivity at all, such as alignment. The goal with regards to selecting for productivity would be "someone who seems productive enough" but getting hung up on exactly how productive feels like a mistake, as aside from being unquantifiable, that isn't going to be the only or probably even main factor that decides the fate of the endeavor. Productivity is not the most challenging problem in software development. In my opinion, as far as factors for success for a technology endeavor goes, even overall technical competence winds up factoring in fairly low at the end of the day. What's important is meeting the threshold you need, not getting as high of a score as possible. I should clarify that I actually agree with you if what you're saying is that the best measure of productivity we have is literally just going off your gut, but my argument is that this gut feeling is terrible. This is in large part because humans are biased, our gut feelings are swayed by things that simply shouldn't factor in. We tend to have more positive opinions of people that we think are like us and we sometimes wind up having negative opinions of someone based on stupid things like disagreeing with them on something that is ultimately irrelevant to whether or not they are productive. And to me, the ultimate nail in the coffin is really in the question of what really constitutes productivity. Productivity is supposed to measure the efficiency of producing something, which already has pitfalls in and of itself when dealing with things that do have discrete, measurable indicators of progress, but programming doesn't, it's not even always obvious if progress is forward or backward sometimes. What's most important, performance optimizations, disaster planning, features, robustness, minimizing resource utilization? The best answer you can generally say is "It depends," and moreover, everyone will have a different set of competencies they're best at, so a person doesn't really have some single "productivity value" you could summarize them with. Yet, all of those things are pretty important for any serious technology organization, so you would want people with a variety of different affinities. At that point, it starts to beg the question of whether or not attempting to directly measure software productivity is a worthwhile endeavor. I'd argue not.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I suppose the question is: can you supply a word you would use when deciding on who to hire for a technical role? Does anyone off the street contribute the same amount of that word, or would you be selective?