> You can't measure any productivity that has any cognitive component.
Are you able to elaborate on why this is true please?
Are you able to elaborate on why this is true please?
The company as a whole makes a profit, how do you know what it would have been if feature X wasn't implemented? And ten people had a role in deciding to implement it, four in implementing it.
How can I possibly put a number on my contribution?
Your number won't be exact, but it doesn't have to be and double counting among the other people isn't always bad.
That I work on the front ends was only partly my choice, we all move around depending on where we need people at that time, and other people decide what needs to be implemented.
If we were to fire all developers, we would probably lose hardly any sales the first year. But over time, licenses would go down more and more. So part of this year's profit is due to the work of people who left us years ago.
I don't see any point in claiming some specific part of our profit. People would laugh at me, probably.
I remember once being a similar conversation regarding a training program I was working on, and the customer was trying to assess the value of the training not on the improved performance of the employees, but on some measurable "knowledge unit" that had been transferred to the student (regardless of their ability to retain it).
It was beyond frustrating.
The goal is to measure people's results. It might occasionally take a relatively-long time to find a seemingly-simple solution. But if an engineer /always/ takes a long time to find every solution, and upon inspection the problems were not actually difficult, then you most likely have a low-productivity engineer on your hands.
1. solved the original problem, took 2 days and thousands of lines of code 2. changed the problem, took 20 minutes 50 lines of code 3. changed the problem in another way, took 2 days and thousands of lines but this solution solved TEN problems
Now, which one is "better"? It makes no sense.
This is daily life in every tech company. It’s true that in some cases it’s hard to accurately rank between two people (because the work is multidimensional) but in many many cases the discrepancies in productivity are obvious.