Re:Work on these things
by marcus_holmes on Thursday January 09, 2020 @11:49AM
(#22002765)
Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.