Hacker News Reader

Comment by tripledry | Hacker News Reader

I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs. For me it's almost impossible to get it objectively right.

Maybe this doesn't apply to your case, but how would you measure outputs of say product development, or any data related project. Lot's of things don't have a good measure of output before the thing is done. Maybe your product / analysis improves profitability by 10x or maybe it was a flop and lost money.

Tangential, but I'm also seeing the quality of measures going down, with AI it seems that the number of [emails|code|analysis] produced is again a good measure.

View on HN

> I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs.

Measuring outputs or inputs (hard work) is always hard. Did someone get the thing that was asked done both quickly and correctly? Do they do this consistently?

I also find inputs harder to measure because someone could be in the office 12 hours/day, but on Facebook the whole time. They could also just spin their wheels doing 'fake' work.

I spend some time going through what programmers wrote over the past years and many of them were rewarded for getting things done quickly with no complaints.. The more diligent ones probably didn't last since they got things done correctly which takes a lot more time and thought.

It's why I said quickly and correctly. I think it's a cop out to say someone was slow because they were building it correctly. Famously, the old space shuttle software was developed very slowly because it had to be 100% correct at all times. Most software does not need that level of correctness. Part of a SE's job is to understand that.

I pay a lot of attention when someone claims to have solved a problem I suspect to be NP-hard. There are a lot of possible explanations, for example they may have an incorrect measurement function or they may have chosen a simpler related problem that isn't really NP-hard, or both.

Fast, quality, cheap.

Pick two.

Plenty of things are made fast, at high quality, and cheaply.

Some things just aren't very hard to make.

You don't have to pick two exclusively. They are all connected sliding scales. Part of engineering is figuring out where the slides need to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com