I have no envy; I'm a software engineer as well. I just don't seem to struggle, as others claim to, in measuring productivity. I find it fairly straightforward to see that some people are more productive than others, at least in my workplace where we can hold most things constant (e.g. meeting count, managerial ability, etc, etc). Yes, there may be external factors, and that's unfortunate. Yes, it's not fair that some people are more productive than others despite putting in half the effort. But I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend it's invisible.
Because you are measuring at a very broad and basic level.
Steve is more productive than Susan.
Great. How much more productive? Can you turn it into a number?
Can you still do it consistently when Steve and Susan are in different teams in different parts of the organisation trying to achieve different goals?
I've done DB upgrades that took 10 minutes and I've done DB upgrades that took 3-4 months. What changed was not my productivity but the nature of the problem. Yet from the outside they were both just DB upgrades.
If Susan had done the DB upgrade in 12 weeks could we confidently claim that Steve could have done it in 11 weeks? Steve hasn't even done a DB upgrade since he joined the company. Perhaps Steve could have done it in 10 minutes?
If Steve and Susan are in different part of organization, the answer is "cannot compare". If they are doing different job, the answer is the same.
But every once in a while there is a scenarios when you can compare people easily.
There has a weekly rotation to be an support person for other team. During his week, John always answers questions quickly and to the team's satisfaction. Meanwhile James struggles to answer them and cannot troubleshoot product his team is writing. This has been going on for multiple months and hundreds of questions for each, so it's not "bad week" unlucky or fluke. We now know who is better at answering questions about product.
John and James are doing DB migrations, they did many dozens of them. The migrations are assigned randomly. But John is usually finishing his migrations with no problems, while James often caused outages or missing data. A few times James took over two months to migrate, so the task was taken from him and given to John. John had to discard everything James did and migrate everything from scratch. Now there is a migration for a very important client and CEO is fed up with random assignment.. who is he going to choose?
Or maybe while John is technically adept, he's also a huge jerk and belittles people at standup, while James is the quintessential communicator with jr devs, etc.
Real life is messy. I've seen more people get replaced due to attitude or teamfit issues than specifically due to technical incompetence.
Agreed.
> If Steve and Susan are in different part of organization, the answer is "cannot compare". If they are doing different job, the answer is the same.
These are the situations where we would get the most value from the metrics though.
The team level already has an Engineering Manager or Tech Lead who can directly deal with team level problems.
This is moving goalposts. OP's argument was "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity", not "You Can't Convert Software Productivity into a Floating Point Number With 3 Decimals of Accuracy."
Would that be a fairer assertion?
Then I shall move the goalposts. Can you address my shifted goalpost?
I personally did not interpret the author as literally meaning there is no such thing as software productivity but I agree the way he wrote it was confusing and could be interpreted that way.
Even in his toy example he clearly stated Peter did a better job than Frank.
I think that's the source of the problem: it's impossible to measure the "work" required to solve most software problems. If you tell me to carry a stone up a hill, I can put that in a formula and know exactly how much work I'll have to do. But if you give me a ticket to do a DB upgrade, I can, at best, make an educated guess.
So by the time I close the ticket, how much work have I done, and how do I know whether the time I've spent it proportional to the work I've done?
What are your eyes measuring? Are you being fooled?
For other teams yeah, it's harder, or maybe even impossible if the teams are isolated.
I'm not sure how true this really is. We all like to think that we're good at estimating other people's ability, particularly if we work closely with them, but how can you validate that impression?
Something that happened to me at one point in my career was that I joined a team that was half new hires with little experience, and half long-term employees with a lot of experience. Because the long-term employees were typically extremely busy, I ended up answering a lot of questions from the entry-level devs. So I spent time documenting the system, doing trainings, doing 1-on-1 code reviews, and so on.
During the performance review, feedback from the entry-level devs was that I was highly productive, and feedback from the long-term employees was that I was a slacker.
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.)
