[brentsch]

The paper may not offer insightful prescriptions for experienced engineers, but can work like this still be useful for informing future studies in a meaningful way? The authors repeatedly note the widespread inadequacies of the current research landscape. (To anyone familiar with the literature, is their assessment accurate?) In my eyes, the message is that the paper represents an incremental step in the direction of a truly detailed understanding of the factors involved in developer productivity. Even if there's a broad intersection between the answers one would get from taxi drivers and from computer scientists, the distance between the two fields makes that an unexpected result, which should prompt us to change how we think about computer science* and/or how we think about studying it.

*or cab driving

[bdowling]

> The authors repeatedly note the widespread inadequacies of the current research landscape.

This is standard language in academic research papers. It is there to sell the importance of the research to the reader, in particular to journal editors or peers who review the article. It is mere puffery.