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Do you have an example of something these teams have developed that has actually made software engineers more productive?

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No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subjectively prefer.

Software engineering is a form of process automation which by its nature is a form of productivity improvement. So if some teams are not streamlining and consistently improving business processes then asking another team to help them do so with more software is kinda nonsensical.

For a while I worked on build tools and CI pipelines and I can honestly say that I never improved anyone's productivity. Most of my work was figuring out how to remove performance bottlenecks that unwitting software engineers would invariably add to the build and test process because a manager was breathing down their neck about delivering some feature yesterday. If business processes are dysfunctional then that's not a software productivity problem and can not be fixed by adding more software.

Typescript

Good example. TypeScript is a great language.

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