[gkcalat]

Curious how companies measure developers productivity in the era of vide engineering... Token usage? Lines of code? Features shipped? Bug fixed? Code health? Maybe we should use amount of code read or PRs reviewed? Or another metric that would correlate with the amount of person's accountability?

[roncesvalles]

My company (primarily a software company with 100k+ employees) went back to measuring lines of code.

Managers have a literal orgwide leaderboard now of how many LOCs were committed by each IC. As expected, right after they started doing this, there were a lot of frivolous refactoring projects where people moved code from one repo to another repo or consolidated stuff into a common repo, just to boost their LOCs.

[simonw]

Measuring developer productivity has been an unsolved problem for decades already, vibe engineering just makes that unsolved problem feel even harder.

[ozim]

Measuring “single developer productivity” is unsolved problem. It also is not a problem unless you are pointy haired boss and want to plan bonuses based on that or fire people based on that.

You definitely can measure team output over time and have some idea. Compare team to what they did in last 6 months and you have your measure for having idea how much can be achieved next month. But you cannot not plan like what can be achieved in longer period just next sprint or two.

This said you cannot compare teams like that.

[chii]

proxies like customer/revenue growth, complaints/satisfaction and such works imho.

[ozim]

Missing part of discussion is “what for?”.

To make personnel decisions who to fire or give bonuses it doesn’t work. Just as lines of code don’t. If any of those indicators is lacking you have to dig deeper.

What lazy managers want is a single number they don’t have to dig into to make decisions. Lines of code, story points, bug counts.

To plan work for next sprint having last 6 months of stats gives quite good idea what can be achieved. But story points or stats are not useful for telling if specific features will be developed in specific timeframe.

[tonyedgecombe]

How can you assign revenue growth to a particular feature?

Even if the customer tells you they bought your product because you added widget x you can't really be sure.

So much of this stuff is emotional rather than rational.

[twothreeone]

Does it matter? The ultimate way to measure productivity is $$$.. companies that generate more $$$ with the same number of "people" are more "productive". Drilling that number down to orgs/teams/ICs is a political endeavor, which means how you do that depends on the result you're looking to generate.

[kavalg]

True, but the relationship is certainly not linear and not a Markov process. Also, the $$$ a company makes are rarely directly translated to incentives for developers. I remember a case where a company was doing an OK engineering/product job, but had problems with sales. Then a new sales driven CEO came into place and for the next 3-5 years the company had great financial results, while at the same time eroding the engineering culture (who cares if money is flowing anyway). Then that guy left and the next CEOs had to take care of the mess.

[riknos314]

Even if the ultimate measure is dollars most employers will attempt to predict which metrics of employment best correllate with dollars so they can predict how many people to hire

[pjmalandrino]

defenetly a big strugglez.. we are working with researchers on that actually..

I think a descent answer is a cross-factor one.

We have agile teams, that have a velocity measured in story points. This gives a first good idea but it is not the all truth. It is a very relative measurment.

but if you add informations about pure productions : Number of PR's Number of commits in PR's Number of code lines Number of comments on PR's

Then you got something more interesting.

Also, we are looking for a way to add quality indicators to understand if it is just rush, or full vibe coded code that will make project los t in few months ..

But I agree with other comments saying that it is a struggle, and AI coding just make more painful ..

[noitpmeder]

"Trust", as unquantifiable as it is, will be the only metric

[msteffen]

I've never heard this before, but it seems very insightful to me.