At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home

Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ... by Barrin92 on Monday September 14, 2020 @10:26PM (#24477318)

>The question that we need to ask more often is, if productivity is so hard to measure, maybe it is possibly because we might not be creating as much value as we have largely tricked ourselves into believing we have.

at a very low level productivity is hard to measure because it's tacit and implicit rather than explicit. The reason why we can measure the productivity of a business is because it responds to price signals and you can put a literal number on what they put out.

You can try running some sort of market scheme within your company but at some point the trade-offs are bad and it adds too much complexity and creates strange incentives.

For software in particular if anything the opposite of your assumption is likely true. It adds a lot of value without necessarily being able to put a price tag on it. It's pretty hard to measure what wikipedia or vim is worth in terms of productivity as long as they're not charging, but that doesn't mean it's not worth anything.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ... by cryptonector on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:12AM (#24478074)

This. The productivity of a business is its ROI, roughly its profit + reinvestment. The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs. It's much harder to measure the productivity of an individual employee who is not a salesperson or directly supporting sales. Some are rockstars, and these you know when you see them. But the rest... it's harder to tell. Metrics can only do so much, and often they are easily gamed -- they just aren't directly related to the bottom line because these aren't salespeople, but you can't only have salespeople either. Take sprints: if you really want employees to hit every sprint then they'll work hard to hardly load their sprints. As you say, there isn't really a market inside a business, so it's hard to just look at the "bottom-line" for every non-sales force employee.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at ... by etripe on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:59AM (#24479527)

> The productivity of a salesperson is also easy to measure: sales / compensation and travel costs.

It's not that simple, because most companies don't perform inter-departmental cost accounting. A salesperson might seem to be very productive, while actually selling made-up solutions that are very cost-intensive to implement. To get a real number on how productive they are, you would need to measure:

([sum of sales * price] - [sum of solutions sold * implementation cost]) / compensation

or even:

customer price * weighted average of per-deal profit margin / total compensation

The cost to implement isn't added value. This kind of internal debiting would also change how management looks at IT. If they can solve the problem for less than the estimated cost by the salesperson, they're turning a profit. If they're taking longer due to "science fiction" products being sold, the blame lies squarely with sales. As it is now, salespeople are mainly incentivised for units sold and total price for deals made. You can be a rockstar salesperson while simultaneously mainly causing huge problems downstream.

[ Parent | on HN ]