[HN Gopher] Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
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       Why is it so hard to measure productivity?
        
       Author : svsaraf
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2023-09-04 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.fractional.work)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.fractional.work)
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | Because it's not observable; it has to be inferred. Every
       | employee affects the finished product through a complex web of
       | interactions. As a latent variable, we can only hope to gain a
       | noisy estimate. Companies don't bother measuring productivity
       | themselves. Rather they let employees make their own case, based
       | on their work, using whatever data they can scrounge.
        
       | svsaraf wrote:
       | Where is the Moneyball for knowledge workers?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | kelseyfrog wrote:
         | Whats the incentive to share it? Disclosure is an alpha-erasing
         | move.
        
       | frnkng wrote:
       | Currently I'm following the idea that it starts with good work
       | priorization. With other words: What work shall an
       | organization/team/individual actually execute? Which tickets
       | shall be picked from the infinite stream of tickets? How do you
       | know that the right tickets are picked? Unless this questions can
       | be answered, measuring the individual performance is completely
       | impossible in the short term. One can ,,work hard" and produce a
       | lot of code, write many tests, do many tickets with low ROI and
       | still achieve subpar results. Thus the measure of productivity
       | must truly capture the added value of one's work. And there is no
       | ,,one size fits all" solution.
       | 
       | Long term the differences in productivity are clearly visible.
        
       | ndjdbdbnms wrote:
       | > Interview performance (at least for those hired) definitely
       | does not correlate with on-the-job performance. But there isn't a
       | better interviewing process that we know of. So we continue using
       | the least worst option.
       | 
       | I am glad we as an industry are emulating good science here.
       | 
       | It doesn't work so we keep doing it because we can't try anything
       | different because what we are doing doesn't work.
       | 
       | Feynman would be proud.
        
         | iraqmtpizza wrote:
         | Of course there is a better interviewing process that we know
         | of. The US military has been using it for like a century.
        
           | tuna74 wrote:
           | Could you describe (or provide a link to an explanation) that
           | process?
        
         | tracer4201 wrote:
         | > It doesn't work so we keep doing it because we can't try
         | anything different because what we are doing doesn't work.
         | 
         | Saying it "doesn't work" is a stretch, no?
         | 
         | The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews
         | for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this
         | process are probably "good enough".
         | 
         | And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are
         | mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the
         | end of the day, that's all their shareholders care about.
         | 
         | We won't have meaningful change unless there's an incentive.
         | You think something is broken, but the key decision makers
         | don't agree.
         | 
         | Source: 10+ years in big tech
        
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