Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

What should we measure to measure productivity of journalists, of novel writers, of pop song composers? How do you measure the output of a engineer in a clothing factory or a short run machine tool shop?

"Management" needs to stop thinking that software is an assembly line and that they are managing "workers". The actual workers are CPUs and GPUs - and coders "manage" those - coders are the new managers.

The bullshit jobs people worry about are those managers who think they are arranging and orchestrating coders and if they shuffle them faster they will get better results.

As more and more of the real world becomes eaten by software, measure that.

I like the comparison to a engineer in a factory.

In 1960 how did we measure the impact of an Detroit factory engineer? "Did the time to turn around the factory line drop this quarter?" That is a high level, impactful metric that has many inputs and would be a "managerial or executive level" metric with bonus attached

Today that same metric works for "has the turnaround time for a new release of the data pipeline improved this quarter"

Those are the metrics that will matter. Measure those.

> What should we measure to measure productivity of journalists?

Visits, clicks, read time.

> Novel writers?

Sales, reviews.

> Pop song composers?

Hits.

> "Management" needs to stop thinking that software is an assembly line and that they are managing "workers"

I can't avoid to find funny the thought of telling management, as an engineer, what they should do.

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Good software engineers should embrace good productivity metrics (like the ones presented) as a meritocratic path to success.

I find there are 2 distinct set of metrics for engineers: ability to delivery, and to create value. Both important, both difficult to measure, both possible to approximate, and both benefit the business.

> > What should we measure to measure productivity of journalists?

> Visits, clicks, read time.

> > Novel writers?

> Sales, reviews.

> > Pop song composers?

> Hits.

These are all proxies for revenue. So, you could just measure revenue.

Then you fall into the trap of producing mediocre creative work to try to maximize revenue.

If you're coding for someone else, rather than coding for yourself, why is this a trap?

It might be satisfying to deliver a hyper-optimized end product, using optimal algorithms everywhere, with everything tuned so that it delivers the maximum performance with the minimum resource usage. But is that what your customer is paying for? Or are they paying for a website that works well, and is operational at the end of the month?

Not everything has to be a work of high art. Pop art is fine too.

For one thing, total revenue over some longer time period is probably the actual thing to maximize. Short-term revenue may not be the best predictor of that, but we still need short-term metrics to evaluate performance.

One should keep in mind that the word “meritocracy” was mainly popularized by people warning about what a bad idea it is. This seems to have just lead to people hearing the word and immediately implementing it.

My perception of the word "meritocracy" is that it's usually used by an autocrat to describe his autocracy. A head of a hedge fund or start-up business might say "Come work for me, you will find it so rewarding, I've created a true meritocracy here." Inevitably that raises the question "Who decides what's meritorious?" The unspoken answer: "I do."

Meritocracy’s like most orgs usually have secret salaries, so you cannot verify that they really are Meritocracies.

Well x-cracies are about power, not about money. I believe there are genuine differences in the extent to which organizations are transparent, both about power and about money. But even with full transparency, what is there to verify if there is no way to define "merit" that everyone in the org can agree upon? That lack of agreement gives latitude to the autocrat to use the term "merit" to mean whatever suits him this week.

Generate impact, deliver value, get shit done(tm), three core metrics we all know and yet the antithesis of modern Agile methodology which requires the above to be somehow broken down further into discrete compute units as measured by the Master.

Like rating a 5-star chef on individual eggs cracked per week rather than gourmet distributed systems delivered and Paxos hungers sated.

It'll surprise you, but 5-star chefs do get rated on individual eggs cracked per week. Because that directly translates into "meals served", which means utilization.

And every single one of those eggs gets evaluated independently - because as a 5-star chef, you're only as good as the last meal you made. A bad review is not a good life event to experience.

If you want to get rated on "got some shit cooked", you might want to try working at the griddle in a local diner instead. (Although... throughput still matters)

I am pretty sure we have learnt that visits / clicks or "engagement" are metrics that lead to places we don't like.

Metrics don't exist in a vacuum - they not only tell us where we are, they set guides to directions we want to take.

Also required quote:

"Some one asked me " Bert Bacharach, you have written so many hit songs, what is the secret to writing a hit pop song. I said If I knew that why would I do anything other than write hit pop songs?"

> Visits, clicks, read time.

The fact we measure this way has destroyed journalism as a profession that writes important and accurate stories that inform the public.

It also reveals the problem that a locally optimizing for something can lead to reduced global levels of that thing. E.g. a journalist on a site making click bait might increase the views on his article while also turning people off the site as a whole, destroying it.

>>> I can't avoid to find funny the thought of telling management, as an engineer, what they should do.

Think of it this way - it's fine to "tell your elected representative what to do" - perhaps we should look at executives as an elected function

We need less people who measure things at our companies and more engineers who are actually designing and implementing the technology.

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