Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by mathematically on Monday October 18, 2021 @05:38PM (#28912115)

It's best to give up the idea of measuring software productivity entirely. Almost no one would seriously wonder how to measure artistic productivity and software engineering is a lot more like art than most people realize because it is fundamentally a creative activity.

Software is also too abstract to be measured the same way assembly line productivity is measured so there is no point in trying to impose a metric based productivity framework on top of software engineering. It's unlikely any such effort will be successful or will lead to any positive outcomes.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by ParameterOne on Monday October 18, 2021 @07:26PM (#28913139)

It's best to give up? Almost no one would seriously wonder?Software is also too abstract?

Developer productivity questions will always occur in the minds of the people signing the front of the paycheck.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by mathematically on Monday October 18, 2021 @08:06PM (#28913437)

Then it's best to disabuse them of such notions. If they want a consistent product that is produced by the operation of an assembly line then they should invest in factories instead of software and software engineers.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by bendmorris on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @11:46AM (#28919418)

Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by mathematically on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @01:48PM (#28921132)

Do you have an example of something these teams have developed that has actually made software engineers more productive?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by bendmorris on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @02:17PM (#28921465)

No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subjectively prefer.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by mathematically on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @02:26PM (#28921571)

Software engineering is a form of process automation which by its nature is a form of productivity improvement. So if some teams are not streamlining and consistently improving business processes then asking another team to help them do so with more software is kinda nonsensical.

For a while I worked on build tools and CI pipelines and I can honestly say that I never improved anyone's productivity. Most of my work was figuring out how to remove performance bottlenecks that unwitting software engineers would invariably add to the build and test process because a manager was breathing down their neck about delivering some feature yesterday. If business processes are dysfunctional then that's not a software productivity problem and can not be fixed by adding more software.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by jf22 on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @02:31PM (#28934249)

Typescript

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Re:Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity? by mathematically on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @07:52PM (#28938433)

Good example. TypeScript is a great language.

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