Ask HN: How does Google measure programmer productivity?

15 points by nopal 12 years ago | 6 comments

There was an article [1] on Quartz yesterday that says, "Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and the level of productivity that teams are expected to deliver assumes that employees are working on their primary responsibilities 100% of the time."

I'm hoping someone from Google can chime in and say whether Google's really measuring each employee's productivity, and, if so, how they're doing it.

I've been involved in efforts to measure my team's productivity using function point analysis and LoC measurements, but both felt like bogus measures.

It doesn't seem like Google would use either of these measures, given their engineering culture, so I'm genuinely curious as to how they do it.

[1] http://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/

ja27 12 years ago |

At one company, my boss got talked into trying to count LoC so that the combined QA testing / customer support organization could charge their costs against each development team in proportion to their code size. Our team spent the next week cleaning up and removing code left and right. I think we easily chopped away more than 25% of the lines in our codebase. After the first weekly LoC total report, that effort faded away.

I think the only time I've felt like I could actually show my boss any measure of productivity from our teams is when we were trying to follow SCRUM reasonably closely and it was easy enough to show who had allegedly completed what during each and every sprint. I did have to juggle to make sure that each person showed enough hours, which was a pain because we'd assign a task to a single person no matter how much collaboration it took.

codeonfire 12 years ago |

I had this same question. I don't think anyone is going to be able to answer because I think the answer is probably political bickering behind closed doors. Productivity is open to interpretation and it determines who gets money and who's boss gets money. The perception of productivity is at the core of politics at a place like Google.

lgomezma 12 years ago |

I was actually wondering the same. Maybe they have to build X number of features of fix Y number of bugs?

nopal 12 years ago | |

I'm genuinely curious. Core premise of the article is that Google is abandoning 20% time because they have these metrics in place and management places so much value in them. If the articles correct, the measurement they're using is having a huge financial and technological impact on one of the most successful software companies around.

ghostdiver 12 years ago |

What happens when someone is underperforming?

winter_blue 12 years ago | |

At Google, they get put on a "Performance Improvement Plan", which is really intended to give you enough to find another job and resign (rather than get fired). I don't think they actually expect anyone on a PIP to have a rise in performance and to stay on board.