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ozim | on: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
You can - but not on the level of a single developer and you cannot use those measures to manage productivity of a specific dev.

For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics.

You shouldn’t really compare teams but it also is possible if you know what teams are doing.

If you are some disconnected manager that thinks he can make decisions or improvements reducing things to single numbers - yeah that’s not possible.

deely3 | parent
> For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics.

How? Which metrics?

anthonyskipper | root | parent | next
My company uses the Dora metrics to measure the productivity of teams and those metrics are incredibly good.
Capricorn2481 | root | parent
These are awesome, but feel more applicable to DevOps than anything else. Development can certainly affect these metrics, but assuming your code doesn't introduce a huge bug that crashes the server, this is mostly for people deploying apps.

I think it's harder to measure things like developer productivity. The closest thing we have is making an estimate and seeing how far off you are, but that doesn't account for hedging estimates or requirements suddenly changing. Changing requirements doesn't matter for DORA as it's just another sample to test for deployment.

neaanopri | root | parent | next
There's only one metric that matters at the end of the day, and that's $. Revenue.

Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

ImaCake | root | parent | next
> Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

A great generalisation and understatement! Often looking like you are becoming more efficient is more important than actually being more efficient, e.g you need to impress investors. So you cut back on maintenance and other cost centres and the new management can blame you in 6 years time for it when you are far enough away from it to not hurt you.

ozim | root | parent
That is what we pay managers -to figure out- for. They should find out which and how by knowing the team, familiarity with domain knowledge, understanding company dynamics, understanding customer, understanding market dynamics.
seanmcdirmid | root | parent | next
That's basically a non-answer. Measuring "productivity" is a well known hard problem, and managers haven't really figured it out...
mdorazio | root | parent | next
It's not a non-answer. Good managers need to figure out what metrics make sense for the team they are managing, and that will change depending on the company and team. It might be new features, bug fixes, new product launch milestones, customer satisfaction, ad revenue, or any of a hundred other things.
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yorwba | root | parent
Economists are generally fine with defining productivity as the ratio of aggregate outputs to aggregate inputs.

Measuring it is not the hard part.

The hard part is doing anything about it. If you can't attribute specific outputs to specific inputs, you don't know how to change inputs to maximize outputs. That's what managers need to do, but of course they're often just guessing.

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beefnugs | root | parent | next
haha that is not what managers do. Managers follow their KPIs exactly. If their KPIs say they get payed a bonus if profit goes up, then manager does smart number stuff and sees "if we fire 15% of employees this year, my pay goes up 63%" and then that happens
hshshshshsh | root | parent
That sounds like a micro manager. I would imagine good engineers can figure out something for themselves.