[pcmaffey]

Why do we need to measure productivity? No one seems to ask that question. To me it seems that trying to measure the individual (people) parts of a system in some quasi-reproducable and transitive way does more harm to the total output of the system than good.

Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)? If we relinquish individual productivity from our “measure all the things so we can improve them” obsession to the soft realm of the immeasurable, we might magically stop wasting so much time on stupid shit and accomplish a lot more meaningful work.

[_8j50]

I am with you, measure results and assume the team got it done with minimal effort. If it is for headcount then ask if you can get the same results with less headcount. If you want hourly workers who don't give a shit about results, hire those. If you want result oriented salary workers then hire those. The problem is every manager thinks they will be the one person to figure out a middle ground without consequences.

Micromanage here, red tape there, metrics-squeeze salary people and blame anything but your management tactics when things go south. I have been fortunate enough to have had some managers who knew better than all this nonsense though.

You just can't argue against results.

[baal80spam]

The first step of improving a process is to measure it, because only then you will know if it's improved.

[majewsky]

> Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)?

Yes, absolutely. It's difficult to do this in customer surveys because you need a motivation for the customer to engage in a feedback process (e.g. a product review, or a questionnaire after a support call), and then the feedback is mostly about that specific event. But focus group research will absolutely try to measure trust either implicitly (e.g. from sentiment analysis) or using explicit questions.

I also know of at least one company that measures (or at least, tries to measure) "leadership trust" among their employees using surveys.

[aeternum]

So would you just fire the entire team if a product does poorly?

Many individuals don't like startups because of this risk, most startup only get 1-2 chances to get productivity right. Very few waste time measuring productivity.

[gabrielso]

Start-ups don't get 1-2 chances to get productivity right. They get 1-2 chances to get PRODUCT right.

If they don't get productivity right from the get-go, they only get 1 chance instead of the "1-2 chances".

That's the risk most individuals don't like about startups, if productivity is not a centerpiece of their operation, the leadership pushes for the only other solution they believe: long hours in inhumane working conditions.

I don't believe there's causation between a start-up productivity and their product success, but I would love to be proven wrong.

[quickthrower2]

Option 1 - Don't measure and hope

Option 2 - Measure

Option 3 - Use judgement

We undervalue qualitative measurements when talking about this stuff. But in real life it is all there is. If you did everything with a measuring tape, you could do nothing (not even walk to your car!). If you care about nothing and close your eyes, things will get disorganized and chaotic and out of control.

This doesn't mean measure nothing, but don't try to get some perfect measure of productivity. At least not in creative work like software development.

[skmurphy]

We measure trust all the time: everyone you work with keeps track of whether you tell them the truth and meet the commitments that you make.

People also assess your productivity and the quality of your results in deciding whether to work with you, to ask you to join their team, to hire you, etc...

I would be surprised if you don't try to assess your own productivity and the quality of the results that you deliver. Neither of these may be easy to measure but I don't think you should be ignoring them.

[johnnyanmac]

>Why do we need to measure productivity? No one seems to ask that question.

because the people asking the questions aren't the ones who actually do the work. And timelines are everything to those people (which admitedly falls behind a lot in software due to the nature of the work).

>Do we measure trust (upon which all business is based)?

in an ephemeral way, yes.

[chris12321]

> in an ephemeral way, yes.

So no. Or why not measure productivity in an ephemeral way.

[johnnyanmac]

Glad you asked. Because "trust" is one of the last ways companies can get around being discriminatory in at-will employment without facing lawsuits. In other words, it directly benefits those in power not to directly measure "trust", but quietly base it on the biases of any given manager.

Unless you're in some stack ranked program, lack of trust is the easiest way to be first to be laid off, or on the slower track to be put on a PiP (officially or not). Sadly and ironically enough, "productivity" is one of he few ways to counteract this bias. Having a hard trail of evidence that you met every and all goals, a hard trail that these were the goals to begin with.

I could go on about how you gain trust, and indirect trust or trust via authority, but I think you get the point.

[freefaler]

When you need to do a job and have a certain amount of resources available you need to measure the productivity of your process. If you don't do that you'll waste your resources.

In business this means that if you have a machine that produces X widgets per hours and costs Y dollars to run, you can estimate is it worth running it at all or it's not economical to do that.

With teams of people managers/owners solve the same problem - I have a fixed amount of resources and need to allocate them properly. No measure = no good allocation = going out of business.

The reason capitalism creates more and cheaper goods that socialism is that resource allocation problem is solved by every participant in the free market (or mostly free market). Without measurement, the owners can't allocate the resources properly and they'd go out of business.

If you have worked in a team with badly performing members who don't pull their share of the load this creates imbalances in the team and the best performing members of the team leave, because they don't want to deal with the laggards.