[viscanti]

> There is absolutely NO way to effectively measure programmer productivity.

One of the big reasons programmer productivity is so difficult to measure, is that you need to also see future productivity of everyone else who works on the code. If a programmer takes an extra week to build something more maintainable and that improved design saves months of future work, it's likely a productive use of time, but that's not always obvious until those months are saved (or not saved). That's not easily measured until the full lifecycle of the software is complete.

[johnjlocke]

Measuring programmer productivity, as in long-term impact, is much harder than measuring how many hours Programmer X sits at their desk or how many lines of code they can spit out in a day. Those are metrics that other programmers notice after maintaining code that previous programmers leave behind. It's always going to be a delayed reaction.