| At a granular level, I don’t think it’s meaningfully possible. Think about it, how often do you do the same thing twice? The old programmer joke about writing a script instead of doing the same thing twice, hides a truth that the value of our work is doing stuff we haven’t done before. But, if you have never done a task before how do you measure it? And if you have done a task before, why are you doing it again, can’t you reuse what you did last time? There’s factors out of most devs control that influence their productivity—a mark of a senior dev (IMHO) is someone who understands this and actively unblocks themselves and others. So no, I don’t think you can directly measure a devs productivity. Measuring a team’s productivity is equally challenging, as the team is affected by things out of their control too, and the team is also doing work that hasn’t been done before. Instead, I think looking towards the health and quality metrics of the team’s output (say a service they created/maintain), the health of the team, and actually speaking to engineers is the best chance we have of understanding the how well the team is working. |