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by johnfn 544 days ago
> Great. How much more productive? Can you turn it into a number?

This is moving goalposts. OP's argument was "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity", not "You Can't Convert Software Productivity into a Floating Point Number With 3 Decimals of Accuracy."

2 comments

There’s no real dependable/reproducible single linear measure of software productivity”.

Would that be a fairer assertion?

By that measure there also isn't a real dependable/reproducible scalar that measures athleticism. Nonetheless some people are clearly more athletic than others. Also within a single sport we can easily see that some players are better than others. Here too you could object that people who play offense should not be compared to players in defense. Or that it's not individual players that matters but the team as a whole. And yet, we can still figure out easily who the star players are.
> This is moving goalposts.

Then I shall move the goalposts. Can you address my shifted goalpost?

I personally did not interpret the author as literally meaning there is no such thing as software productivity but I agree the way he wrote it was confusing and could be interpreted that way.

Even in his toy example he clearly stated Peter did a better job than Frank.