[lifeisstillgood]

Fairy Nuff

I suppose he ends with throwing his hands in the air and saying we cannot do it. Well actually we can achieve a measure of literacy, just not perhaps fluency.

We know if a child can read and read well. It's possible to take their written work and assess or mark it. We can (and do in code reviews) do the same for code written by adults.

The problem he is stating is IMO in two parts - measuring basic competence (is a person of net benefit, can they write competent code, are they literate?) which is possible, and how good are they compared to their peers, which is much more subjective and based on taste as much as anything.

So I agree we should not try to measure productivity, I disagree that that's the end of the conversation, mostly because I disagree that productivity is one thing - I see it as more Hygiene/Motivator