[devonkim]

Productivity is a measure I hate to use for individuals because it’s similar to the problem of root cause analysis in systems - our individual productivity comes from many different levers and influences and we tend to act like what works for some archetype of person should work for everyone and even most managers just go by feel basically, which is hardly objective nor measurable let alone accountable. If my CI system is crappy and gives me poor feedback that makes it hard to tell I’m doing something wrong in my commits, it can demotivate me. But fixing it doesn’t mean that I’ll suddenly become a 10x developer either. Similarly, conditions for maximizing potential reliability and performance exists at all times in systems but at least we can open up our editors and go inspect running systems while we really can’t do that with people.

Sometimes firing someone ironically gives them a wake up call and they’ll do great for their next job. Sometimes they don’t learn, sometimes they’ll never recover. Sometimes promoting people helps them, sometimes they become overwhelmed and performance drops again (I’m not speaking Peter Principle either).