[Hermitian909]

> I really wanted some hard research on this, but I know it's a hard one.

I think we'll have to settle for judgment calls.

I tried going through some of the research we have on developer productivity a few years back and it's almost all garbage or is only truly applicable to juniors (e.g. when you're new you really benefit from quick feedback time on static errors).

The entire space suffers from the fact that good experimental design is impossible to implement with anyone who's not a college student (good luck getting professionals to follow your rules for months) and the curse of dimensionality from the need to disentangle individual variations, type of software development, management style, and a thousand other things to try and draw out a signal.

Sadly, many things and life can't be effectively measured.