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The organisation is like a complex organism, and engineering is merely piece of the whole. Each piece contributes to and depends on each other (roughly) to make a business function. Therefore, the word "engineering productivity" by necessity should be put under the category of "intangibles" (in most cases). Still, we can consider some interesting thought experiments. Say, you start with a purely technical team; there are no marketers, no HR, no managers, etc, and the team gets a product going in the market. In such a limited case, one can characterise productivity with "revenue per engineer" (essentially - total revenue / number of engineers). However, in reality, if the marketers, the HR, and various managers, leaders and salesman don't do their jobs, despite having a great product, revenue will approximate towards zero overtime. In reverse, if the marketers merely do their job perfectly, but there are no engineers delivering the product, again there won't be any profits. Despite all these caveats, let me share why I think "revenue per employee" seems like the most useful metric here. Consider the "average revenue per employee" for these two companies: ADP: $284,453 Apple: $2,560,571 Google: $2,020,329 Apple/Google are 10x ADP. I'd argue a good part of this 10x difference we see in the output primarily due to the differences in engineering sophistication. The engineers in these more profitable orgs are doing qualitatively different "types" of engineering (hardware? prototyping? deep research? higher standards?). Increasing engineering prowess, trying more sophisticated projects seems like the biggest boost to the bottom line. |