In my ~25 years of professional software development, the single biggest factor in productivity for me has been whether I was involved at the start of a project. Knowing the initial design decisions, and being comfortable changing anything, allows me to be orders of magnitude more productive than when I'm diving into existing code designed by someone else.

I saw this perhaps most acutely with a company I sold - for a couple of years I was more productive than on nearly any other large software project I've worked on, because I knew the ins and outs of everything. The developers who bought it and took over are probably better developers than I am, and they are unquestionably excellent coders, yet it took a couple of years for them to get productive at making even medium sized changes. It became incredibly obvious to me how handicapped you are diving into something someone else made, especially if the original designer isn't there anymore.

Meshing really well with managers & PMs is probably the next biggest factor in my own experience, but it doesn't come even close to the gap between being there from day 1 vs coming in much later.

> Productivity tracking tools and incentive programs will never have as great an impact as a positive culture in the workplace.

I'm a fan of choosing to use time management apps and productivity tools to manage my own budgets. But I admit that I hate it when I have to do it for someone else.

    1. Subject knowledge: understanding of the subject the software is about (e.g. accounting when building accountancy software).
    2. Platform knowledge: understanding of the platform used to build the software (e.g. Python, SQL, React etc).
    3. Architecture knowledge, which is what the parent is talking about: understanding of the specific choices made in the development, being aware of all the Chesterton's Fences [1] etc.

The article argues that there is no useful measure that operates at a finer grain than “tasks multiplied by complexity”.

I think that complexity is hard to measure and therefore easy to game.

At GitLab we only measure tasks completed, the number of changes that shipped to production, with the requirement that every change has to add value. This measure has been used throughout R&D https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance-in... to assess productivity for multiple years now with good success https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/08/27/measuring-engineeri...

When you tell new engineers about this target they see a great opportunity to game it, just ship smaller changes. It turns out that smaller changes are quicker to ship. Lead to better code and tests. Have lower risk of cancellation and problems in production. And lead to earlier and better feedback.

Inspired by Goodhart’s Law I'll propose the following: A measure that when it becomes a target improves productivity. ~Sijbrandij's Law

Productivity as a software developer consists chiefly in not making mistakes. That can lead to the situation where your best developers may appear to do nothing for long stretches. Research and deliberation are desirable. Blind hacking is the least valuable yet most visible activity of inexperienced programmers. All common "objective" measures of productivity such as closed tickets, lines of code, or PRs are seriously flawed.

We can't even come up with an objective way to score software itself. So how in the world are we going to go even deeper and score the process and the people that create it?

Sarah and Bob make clocks, but sometimes they make hats, and sometimes they make screws, or hammers, or lamps. And sometimes the things they make get sold to customers, but sometimes other employees take them home, sometimes they make parts for each other to use when making bigger projects, and often they help each other and other employees out on unrelated projects. And sometimes they do repairs too. Oh yeah they also paint portraits that hang up around the office.

Try coming up with a measurement for their individual productivity that is easy enough to be useful, hard to game, and cheap enough to make it worth the price.

The first step is to figure out how to measure the value of all the stuff they make...

Most developers like solving problems - this gives them high. Often, without realizing it, they create problems they are eager to solve to get their dose. Solving problems can be quantified, too. Unfortunately, it's hard to quantify the number of problems avoided by manifesting! Often this goes against the first goal I mentioned. For example, solving one problem 10 times gives you closing 10 tickets, making 10 PRs, and contributing a lot more LOCs in a short amount of time. But creating one PR and one ticket, which not only prevents those 10 but 100s and 1,000s more in the future, is quantified as "less work." I've had this at one job recently where every time I suggested fixing a repeated issue was answered with: "We have a bigger fish to fry." Yet, we kept wasting time frying tadpoles.

The smallest organizational unit at which productivity can usefully be measured is an agile team of about 7 people. Below that size the effort of quantifying productivity exceeds any possible value of doing so, and incentivizes the wrong behaviors.

A good manager can get a reasonable subjective sense of individual productivity but won't be able to quantitatively measure it.

The problem is that we do not have a standard "output unit."

> Productivity: the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.

We can all agree "lines of code" is a shit metric, and we can't say "# of bugs closed," because each will have variable difficulty and value. Programmers employed by a business are in charge of automating repetitive tasks, not performing them (the classic measure of productivity).

I perform UX research on APIs. Here, we standardize the "output unit" and therefore can get a better idea of a developer's productivity. Every developer performs the same task, so we can simply measure time spent.

There will never be an ethical solution to measure developer productivity during the workday; this isn't Ford's assembly line.

He mentions increasing salary won't lead to increased productivity ... and that's true, if the same developer remains. But what if we remove that constraint? What if increased salary means a higher quality of developer takes the position? Wouldn't this mean higher productivity?

Bit of a cold scenario, but one way to game it out is hypothetically removing the current dev and then hiring someone better at double the pay.

Or, less unfair seeming, double the pay by hiring a second dev. That might not double productivity ... depending on the situation it might 1.5x it, or just as easily 4x it.

Maybe when developer productivity measurment becomes standard accross the industry we will realise that tech workers are in fact workers. Cogs in a machine. And not independant individuals imposing their will to the world through sheer will like some Randian hero. Maybe then it will then be plainly evident that developers are as alienated as any service worker, and in the end as disposable in the eyes of the shareholders.

Will we then organize with other workers to create better working conditions for everyone or will there be fewer and fewer developers working with ever more powerful technology chasing richer than ever VCs?

In every organization I've worked in, it was obvious who the high performers were and who the low performers were. It was obvious to everyone. The only blind spots were people usually seriously misjudged their own performance.

The problem, however, is that management is always being pushed to make objective measurements. For example, to fire someone, you have to first put him on an improvement plan with objective measurements. Otherwise, you're wide open to a lawsuit over discrimination, etc. You have to prove to a judge someone isn't performing, or that you gave raises based on performance.

Management also gets pushed into these attempts at objective measurements by attempts to optimize the numbers like what works great for a manufacturing process.

What is productivity of managers? How it is measured?

Why productivity of developers must be measured, but productivity of managers not?

I once talked to a retired hardware engineer, a fellow who made real electronic devices, not software. He told me that, over the whole course of his career, 80% of the projects he worked on never made it to market. In other words, 4/5th of his total "productivity" turned out to be waste. Make of it what you will.

Any decently competent technical leader can tell if a developer is being productive or not. It's stupid to waste time trying to measure something that is virtually unmeasurable.

I don't get orgs that use stats like commits/LoC/PRs as KPIs. Most time for software engineering ought to spent ensuring you're building the right thing which requires a lot of collaboration, writing design docs, thinking about the problem, etc to avoid 'building the wrong thing' which is probably the 'default' behavior and hard to avoid. Software engineering is only really valuable if you can easily extend and build it on it to enable whatever product or service you're selling to change as the business changes. If you're churning out throw-away code you never reuse you don't realize any of that value and you will lose.

I did have the idea of directly tying value to a graph of code that enabled a certain user journey. Sorta like 'CUJ-coverage' instead of test coverage. So if a user spent $20 at checkout, every line of code that was touched to enable that user's journey would be credited with that $20. I think this would be an interesting metric I'd probably respect but there are still probably a lot of blindspots this methodology doesn't capture.

Developer productivity is inversely proportional to complaining. Listen to complaints carefully.

It is pretty ironic how much time is wasted on trying measure developer productivity.

Productivity is important, sure. But as with all other professions in which people interact, the interpersonal skills and behavior tend to be more important IMO. Productivity can be massively impacted (positively and negatively) by how well people communicate and get along with each other.

As an individual I often wonder if my contributions are meaningful. The author says, “individual performance is best left for individual contributors to measure in themselves and each other.” How can individuals possibly measure their own performance if it can’t be measured externally?

love the classic 'are story points hours / no / then wtf are they' conversation when PMs intro jira + cousins

have never been sure how summing together something that is supposed to have no relationship with time magically provides an estimate of anything

also not sure why teams are using the central source of truth for progress as the 'daily todo list making' tool

I live in the real world so I estimate in hours

I have never felt my individual productivity go up.

It feels like as I progress my individual work stays the same, but helping others eats any efficiency gains I personally make.

As if when you are new to a module, you are slow because you don’t know anything, then once you have expertise, you are slow because you know everything and are helping others.

Would be interesting to measure this somehow.

The only way to do it I can think of: have two teams or individuals develop the same thing simultaneously and measure the time required to get a result of the same quality. This should be done in longer term to take into account code quality (poor code quality slows down future development).

I've had a number of projects to either add features or fix a bug in large volumes of truly weird (and sometimes jerkoff code), COLT and JES3 being particularly flagrant examples. It can take weeks to find out where the bad code and less than half a dozen lines to fix the problem.

In just about any system of productivity metrics, these two episodes would mark me as dismally productive:

In the bank I was working for, the incidence rate of online banking mainframe reIPLs went from every few days to zero.

At a telecommunication provider, data center reIPLs similarly reduced.

This assumes direct managers want productive developers - this is not my experience. The goal of managers is to increase the number of people they manage, and get more money. I have time and again done things fast only to have blocks put in place to slow things down - no one wants the job done easily and go home, where's the money in that. The inability to measure productivity is a direct result of this imho.

Your proposed law has been tried for many years, by just as many good-willed people who believed their measures would result in target increases. In fact, the entire industry is being bombarded by one such methodology that includes those measures: Scrum. Must we really repeat the years of complaints, criticism and debates to show any measure can get warped and gamed to the point it only vaguely resembles a tool of productivity?

So we get young, naive engineers to focus on small changes. Cool, probably as it should be, you gotta start somewhere. And when these developers get hungry for bigger projects, when they get bored implementing the umpteenth small and by that point (for them) trivial change, how do you encourage them to tackle bigger technical problems? Those that lay the foundation for the new people to do their job more easily and on-board quicker? Or did you actually not tell us all, and you measure far more than just the number of changes?

It seems like a useful aggregate metric, but is it also used to rate individuals? For that purpose, it seems like it would be terrible. What if you have an experienced staff member from whom everyone else constantly seeks advice? That person may be having a positive impact that isn't visible as merge requests.

I have never had the opportunity to try this method but after much theory crafting and many useless pointing meetings and much statistical investigation with negative correlation between "complexity" and "time to completion" I can only think that this is the correct way to get velocity.

What does "good success" mean in this context?

The most common implementation I've seen of this are senior developers who write almost no code, but spend their time telling junior developers what to go back and reimplement, giving advice, etc. It's still the junior programmer's actually getting the product written, just with nudges in the right direction. Not a bad system really, reminds me of the relationship between officers and enlisted in the military.

I'm currently building models around high functioning software developers/projects and what I've noticed is, churn can swing quite a bit. Take the following for example:

https://imgur.com/Yb8WvJY

Over 150 days, this developer's churn really fluctuates and that's because they work on different things, that requires different amounts of code. And if you look at the following:

https://imgur.com/oNmsMSV

you can see they still commit regularly, but as the Reviewability section shows, their changes are mainly small ones, which sort of aligns with what Sid (sytse) mentioned, which is mainly focusing on small changes.

If you look at the bigger picture:

https://imgur.com/vmiOtgU

https://imgur.com/5vf3kWj

The churn for the project microsoft/vscode fluctuates quite a bit as well.

Based on what I've learned so far, you really need a good baseline (that can vary greatly from one developer to another) to be able to determine if somebody is more/less productive.

This isn't at all universally true, it depends on the costs of failure. If you're programming a Mars rover, then sure, avoiding mistakes is paramount. If you're writing a one-off data analysis script that only has to work once and only has to be mostly accurate, spending a week coming up with the ideal specification and writing a full comprehensive test suite is usually much less productive than hacking at it for a few hours until it works. Good software developers know when to make the appropriate safety tradeoffs given the goals and constraints of the task at hand.

Eventually any simply metric like this will become warped because of the effects of both Goodhart's Law, and Campbell's Law.

I assume you mean expensive mistakes! Making cheap mistakes is a great way to learn!

Not making mistakes isn't productivity, that's the bare minimum of acceptable behavior.

Productivity is a measure I hate to use for individuals because it’s similar to the problem of root cause analysis in systems - our individual productivity comes from many different levers and influences and we tend to act like what works for some archetype of person should work for everyone and even most managers just go by feel basically, which is hardly objective nor measurable let alone accountable. If my CI system is crappy and gives me poor feedback that makes it hard to tell I’m doing something wrong in my commits, it can demotivate me. But fixing it doesn’t mean that I’ll suddenly become a 10x developer either. Similarly, conditions for maximizing potential reliability and performance exists at all times in systems but at least we can open up our editors and go inspect running systems while we really can’t do that with people.

Sometimes firing someone ironically gives them a wake up call and they’ll do great for their next job. Sometimes they don’t learn, sometimes they’ll never recover. Sometimes promoting people helps them, sometimes they become overwhelmed and performance drops again (I’m not speaking Peter Principle either).

I worked for a telecom company for ten years. The first few, everything was good, but we were struggling and raises and bonuses were non-existent and layoffs were frequent. Eventually I realized I was making a lower salary from when I started so I just started working less. Toward the end I was working less than four hours a week, getting positive feedback from my manager and skip-manager.

It hurt my career staying at a dead-end job but it gave me years of free time doing pretty much whatever I wanted.

I don't completely agree with this. Money can affect developer productivity, but it takes time to realize its value. Money makes things easier. That person whose being paid the smallest amount possible, is probably trying to just scrape by. Paying people more money frees their personal life up to handle other things, less stress about family stuff etc. I never believed the "leave your personal life at the door," thing. How you live affects your work, and making life easier makes people more productive (on average, not all cases). Now this isn't an immediate thing. It's an investment and it takes time. The person has to realize that money is available (emotionally) and start to trust it will be there.

Two engineers who are not aligned with each other's goals will easily do the work of zero people.

He's right and wrong at the same time.

If I pay above market rate I'll attract better devs for sure, and the caliber of folks in my hiring pipeline will get better. It's not obvious at all unless you know where to look. College is the prime example of that. If you pay better you'll have more new grads applying and they will prioritize you over other offers (unless you are an exceptionally prestigious employer). But even then, you'll never talk to the student who interned twice at FAANG and got a firm offer a year before graduation. You can get that guy only if you are willing to employ him at FAANG salary for two summers.

Employing these guys won't make my existing hires any better than they are in the immediate future.

However

Better hires leads to better teams. I find that certain developers have a multiplicative effect that applies to other devs. They mentor, document, review and help everyone grow. That might actually slow them (taking half a day to explain high level architecture to a lowly junior coder) until you realize the junior coder is now capable of answering questions from his teammates.

> hiring someone better at double the pay

Well... if you knew how to spot somebody twice as good as the one you have now, why didn't you hire that guy in the first place?

> a higher quality of developer

So what is a "higher quality of developer"?

The answer is in the article itself. It gives you real historical data so you can predict how long the project will take with evidence, rather than just a feeling, hope, or guess.

> Velocity is an aggregate measure of tasks completed by a team over time, usually taking into account developers’ own estimates of the relative complexity of each task. It answers questions like, “how much work can this team do in the next two weeks?” The baseline answer is “about as much as they did in the last two weeks,”

If there's one thing the last 50 years of software development has conclusively proven, is that estimating the number of man months (hours) a project will take doesn't work.

> have never been sure how summing together something that is supposed to have no relationship with time magically provides an estimate of anything

Most people dramatically underestimate the amount of time something requires. As long as you give them a clear conversion rate between story points and hours, they will estimate the task in hours -- incorrectly, despite having made the same mistake hundred times in the past -- then convert the hours to story points and tell you the result.

Then someone notices that you have like 200 man-hours in sprint, and you have only selected story points for 100 man-hours. Which in fact is perfectly okay, if you understand that the "100" is the underestimate, and the realistic estimate would actually be close to 200, so you should be happy about the plan! But most people will not get it, and they will insist to plan properly for 200 man-hours. If you don't have enough political power to stop them, they will make you plan for 200 man-hours.

Then at the end of the sprint, everyone is stressed out, and they only completed 50% of planned stories. Because they underestimated how much time the tasks would take... just like research shows humans always do, no matter how many times they got burned in the past, no matter how much you yell at them to make better estimates.

(By the way, the problem with making realistic estimates is not just that individuals suck at it, but also that social forces actively prevent it. Research shows that people who make more realistic estimates are considered less competent than their colleagues, precisely because everyone notices that their estimates are longer that they believe they should be. And no one later changes their opinion just because the estimate turned out to be correct. Like, really, people who estimated something to take 2 weeks and delivered it in 3 weeks were judged as more competent by managers than people who estimated it to take 3 weeks and delivered in 3 weeks. The former made a better impression at the beginning, and the latter didn't provide a better result at the end, so the former made a better overall impression. This is how human brains work.)

So the smart way out is to make a metric that is taboo to convert to hours. Give vague verbal descriptions, like 1 is "trivial", 2 is "fairly easy", 3 is "simple", 5 is "medium", 8 is "kinda difficult", 13 is "tricky", and 21 is "needs to be split to smaller stories". People will first feel weird about it, but then they get used to it, and they will start delivering consistent ratings... like, the kind of story that gets assigned 5 story points in January will probably also get assigned 5 story points in December.

Then all you need is calculate velocity, which is, well, the conversion rate between the story points and hours. But you can't say that, or it will ruin the magic! You just say "during the last sprint, we implemented 50 story points, so for this sprint we will also plan 50 story points", and hope that people will accept that, without making the conversion explicit. And it works...

...until someone says: "Hey wait, so if we have 200 man-hours and plan 50 story points, that actually means that 1 story point equals 4 hours, right? And why are we giving this specific story 3 story points? 12 hours sound too much to me, I am pretty sure we could do it in 8 hours, or even 4 hours if we work hard, right?" (The rest of the team is silent, either because they agree, or they don't want to be seen as less competent.) And then you get another sprint when people plan too much, complete 50% of it, and get another stern talk about being more careful about making estimates.

It is a psychological trick that only works if you stop estimating stories in hours. It always breaks when someone insists on connecting the dots, converting the estimate to hours, and "fixing" it because it is "too much". If we could reliably estimate stories in hours, we wouldn't need story points, but experience shows we can't!

(But if you tell this to people, they will insist that they absolutely can make proper estimates, or that professional developers should be able to make proper estimates. Well, they can't, and we don't live in the should-universe.)

> I live in the real world so I estimate in hours

Do you make your estimates in front of other people who sometimes second-guess them? How often you actually meet your estimates?