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I’m confused as to why anyone would think this would be possible to determine. Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or past

I’m confused as to why anyone would think this would be possible to determine. Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? What job out there is so simple that we can meaningfully measure all the positive and negative effects of the worker as well as account for different conditions between workers. I could probably get behind the idea that you could measure productivity for professional poker players (given a long enough evaluation period). Hard to think of much else.

__loam 1y ago
Won't stop MBAs from trying though.
tomcam 1y ago
Duly upvoted! I tend to agree. Yet the shibboleth of productivity haunts us still.
graemep 1y ago
People in charge love to measure productivity and, just as harmfully, performance. The main insight people running large organisations (big business and governments) have into how they are doing is metrics, so they will use what measures they can have regardless of how meaningful they are. The British government (probably not any worse than anyone else, just what I am most familiar with) does measure the productivity of the NHS: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-productivity/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-productivity/ (including doctors, obviously). They also try to measure the performance of teachers and schools and introduced performance league tables and special exams (SATS - exams sat at various ages school children in the state system, nothing like the American exams with the same name) to do this more pervasively. They made it better by creating multi-academy trusts which adds a layer of management running multi-schools so even more people want even more metrics. The same for police, and pretty much everything else.
Ma8ee 1y ago
We can determine the productivity of factory workers, and that is still(!) how we are seen by some managers. And to be fair, some crud work is repetitive enough so it should be possible to get a fair measure of at least the difference in speed between developers. But that building simple crud services with rest interfaces takes as much time as it does is a failure of the tools we use.
AllegedAlec 1y ago
> Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? Yes, yes we can. Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes that we can't be assessed and that our maangers just need to take that we're worth keeping around on good faith.
- bheadmaster 1y ago
  > Yes, yes we can. Of course we can. But can we do it in a meaningful way, such that the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
  - AllegedAlec 1y ago
    > the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization By making the metrics part of a sustaintable company-wide goal. If there's a company-wide goal to increase X kind of revenue by Y% making actionable targets on how a team can contribute (not lazy shit like "our changes should contribute Z% of that Y%"), and within that create for a person another smaller metric based on that.
    - StrangeDoctor 1y ago
      This would be difficult to apply to R&D orgs or anything seen as a typical cost center. Also, medical facilities… you certainly could define it as profit, but that bothers me and many other people. You could define it as patients seen, or “cured” but that incentivizes very quick but probably poor care. You could define it as intensity of treatment or amount of care given, but you’d probably end up in a situation where 1 incredibly sick person has every doctor treating them. You could define it as…
      - dickersnoodle 1y ago
        This is the kind of thing that pops up when you try to substitute metrics for judgment. It reminds me of the catastrophic fiscal and monetary policies that emerge from economic theories that rest on bad assumptions (like people being rational actors in an economic system) that are there to make the math work.
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
analog31 1y ago
Yet paradoxically, the user knows instinctively. I know exactly when I'll get my next medical checkup, and when the test results will arrive. I know if a software app improves my work, and what it will cost to get a paid license. The hard thing is occupations where the quantity of effort is unrelated to the result due to the vast number of confounding factors.
- lupire 1y ago
  Theres an interesting recent study showing how poorly developers measure their own productivity: https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912

__loam 1y ago

Won't stop MBAs from trying though.

tomcam 1y ago

Duly upvoted! I tend to agree. Yet the shibboleth of productivity haunts us still.

graemep 1y ago

People in charge love to measure productivity and, just as harmfully, performance. The main insight people running large organisations (big business and governments) have into how they are doing is metrics, so they will use what measures they can have regardless of how meaningful they are. The British government (probably not any worse than anyone else, just what I am most familiar with) does measure the productivity of the NHS: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-productivity/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-productivity/ (including doctors, obviously). They also try to measure the performance of teachers and schools and introduced performance league tables and special exams (SATS - exams sat at various ages school children in the state system, nothing like the American exams with the same name) to do this more pervasively. They made it better by creating multi-academy trusts which adds a layer of management running multi-schools so even more people want even more metrics. The same for police, and pretty much everything else.

Ma8ee 1y ago

We can determine the productivity of factory workers, and that is still(!) how we are seen by some managers. And to be fair, some crud work is repetitive enough so it should be possible to get a fair measure of at least the difference in speed between developers. But that building simple crud services with rest interfaces takes as much time as it does is a failure of the tools we use.

AllegedAlec 1y ago

> Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? Yes, yes we can. Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes that we can't be assessed and that our maangers just need to take that we're worth keeping around on good faith.

bheadmaster 1y ago
> Yes, yes we can. Of course we can. But can we do it in a meaningful way, such that the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
- AllegedAlec 1y ago
  > the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization By making the metrics part of a sustaintable company-wide goal. If there's a company-wide goal to increase X kind of revenue by Y% making actionable targets on how a team can contribute (not lazy shit like "our changes should contribute Z% of that Y%"), and within that create for a person another smaller metric based on that.
  - StrangeDoctor 1y ago
    This would be difficult to apply to R&D orgs or anything seen as a typical cost center. Also, medical facilities… you certainly could define it as profit, but that bothers me and many other people. You could define it as patients seen, or “cured” but that incentivizes very quick but probably poor care. You could define it as intensity of treatment or amount of care given, but you’d probably end up in a situation where 1 incredibly sick person has every doctor treating them. You could define it as…
    - dickersnoodle 1y ago
      This is the kind of thing that pops up when you try to substitute metrics for judgment. It reminds me of the catastrophic fiscal and monetary policies that emerge from economic theories that rest on bad assumptions (like people being rational actors in an economic system) that are there to make the math work.

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]

analog31 1y ago

Yet paradoxically, the user knows instinctively. I know exactly when I'll get my next medical checkup, and when the test results will arrive. I know if a software app improves my work, and what it will cost to get a paid license. The hard thing is occupations where the quantity of effort is unrelated to the result due to the vast number of confounding factors.

lupire 1y ago
Theres an interesting recent study showing how poorly developers measure their own productivity: https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912