[seiji]

Is measuring productivity isomorphic to the hiring problem?

Everybody says there's a "shortage of developers," but I know good developers who keep getting shitcanned after a few interviews where nothing seemingly went wrong.

We can't tell who's going to be productive. Since we can't tell, we come up with ten foot high marble walls to scale. Our sterile interview problems make us feel "well, at least the candidate can do our Arbitrary Task, and since we decided what Arbitrary Task would be, they must be good, because they did what we wanted them to do."

Productivity is pretty much the same. There's "just get it done" versus "solving the entire class of problems." Is it being productive if you do 50 copies of "just get it done" when it's really one case of a general problem? I'm sure doing 50 copies of nearly the same thing make you look very busy and generates great results, but solving the general problem could take 1/20th the time, but leave you sitting less fully utilized after (see: automating yourself out of a job).

[kasey_junk]

They are absolutely the same problem. Because we can't measure productivity, we can't determine relative quality in an objective way. If we could, it would make the hiring process much more simple.

The question I have is, how is this much different than any other profession? How do we measure doctor productivity? What keeps me up at night is that it is very likely that the 90/10 crap to good ratio in software developers is probably the same ratio as surgeons.

[vadman]

Must be the same in every profession. How many of e.g. your school teachers were good? About 10%.

I am wondering if the ratio holds for crap to good parents. The scarier aspect of this is that people are actually being trained for their professions, as opposed to parenting, so the ratio may be even worse.

[pnathan]

This is a good insight. Both problems relate to the ability to socially interact with other people, determine what they want, and then to technically produce product to satisfy the other people.