Measuring Software Developer Productivity??? | Prime Reacts

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Authors: Chandra Gnanasambandam, Martin Harrysson, Alharith Hussin, Jason Keovichit, and Shivam Srivastava

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[TheDanVail]

What if we measured MBA productivity? We’ll make the KPI “number of words it takes to explain something” or maybe “fluffy buzzwords per article”

[fosteredlol]

It's really easy to track productivity. The more developers complain about what they're doing, the more productive they are.
"Everything is great!" - Suspicious
"I want to kill whoever made this" - Very productive

[chrism]

Nothing says "my company treats engineers like shit" quite like hiring McKinsey to do a "productivity audit".

[iWhacko]

This sounds like one of those "consultants" that are paid insane amounts of money to help analyze your workspace, and then leaves without doing anything, but management is happy because now they have some pdf's with pie charts.

[SimGunther]

They're a consultancy. That's why they "need" to measure performance: so they know which underperforming underperformer they need to fire due to making one presentation a year instead of once every 4 months.

[culturedgator]

This article is living prooof that McKinsey can be successfuly replaced by McGPT. Mostly like with a tremendous added value, stellar productivity enhancements, out-performant tracking metrics and 420% ROI for all shareholders. Skyhigh ROI. So much ROI that the global economy will get a ROI just by up-optimizing the consulting processes.

[Mel-muox]

Yes, you can measure Art Productivity!!!

Every creative industry begins to weep...

[georgerogers]

Yes but once you make a metric a goal you get the metric rather than the real thing the metric used to correspond to.

[doresearchstopwhining]

For anyone wondering - this is what happens when you lose your soul to the man. You end up writing articles like this.

[handlechar]

Prime still ignoring our pleadings for a video about how he has managed to escape from seemingly silly scrum things like sprints and story points 😢

[mynameisjeff]

Why do companies think they are entitled to 100% of my productivity anyways?

[DacusInvictus]

Goodhart's Law: Once a metric is used as a basis for decision-making or control, it loses its reliability as an accurate measure. 'nuff said

[michaelslattery]

Trust. Hire good people. Let teams self-organize. Establish a rapport between devs and user/clients. => Successful team.

[eshanchatterjee]

Software Architect at my workplace literally used copilot to write 3 entire classes. And all I could think was how I have to fix the issues in those classes.

[csy]

This is why we have so many roles in tech and everyone is important to increasing the productivity of a team. Even the scrum master, though most scrum masters are useless, their role is actually really important and if they are not doing their job, usually someone else has to step up to be the glue but a good scrum master makes all the difference. It's good to have tools and metrics, but ultimately you need to identify gaps and make sure all the different roles in your SDLC are filled properly otherwise things don't go smoothly and the momentum is destroyed (gradually) It's not about the metrics, it is about the gaps and the creases that you need to smooth out

[Trapezoideris]

I think this article was written by chat gpt

[TreeLuvBurdpu]

"You thought copilot was your new slave, but it's actually your new taskmaster" --unfun mid-level manager

[paulguk]

I love the irony that McKinsey hasn't paid it's web devs enough to be able to cope with dark mode correctly. Maybe it wasn't important to their customer satisfaction metrics though?

[LillyAnarkitty]

This gets back to a fundamental problem with hierarchy - everything must be legible to the higher levels of the structure. Everything must be boiled down, flattened, and reduced to numbers or bite-sized pieces of information that managers, executives, and shareholders can understand. Everything that doesn't fit into their spreadsheets and power points gets erased. The question is not "can/should stuff get measured" - it's who is measuring what, and for what purpose. This conversation often blows past the fact that individual developers and teams probably understand their own productivity far better and in much deeper ways than their superiors ever will. We jump straight to debating what types of reports should be generated for the higher-ups to see without stopping to ask why those higher-ups are so out of touch in the first place.
Also you can change the filter settings on a site-by-site basis under the "More" tab of Dark Reader. (14:27)

[Descent]

The serendipity of prime reading an article by mckinsey and getting tilted after I was forced to do 3 hours of mckinsey "improvement" courses today