Productivity isn't about going faster
44 points
by gx
2 hours ago
| 10 comments
| humanpro.co
| HN
ninjahawk1
48 seconds ago
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I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. What can I really do that matters?

Make money? It’s gone eventually. Be remembered? I’ll eventually be forgotten. Be REALLY remembered? I’ll be forgotten in a few thousand years. Become immortal? All entropy in the universe eventually dissipates.

What I can do though, is have a good time with the people I love.

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joelthelion
1 minute ago
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This rings very true as an industry. We are all extremely busy, producing billions of lines of code, and yet the software around us isn't really getting any better.

What we'd need instead is concerted simplification. But that ain't gonna happen.

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l5870uoo9y
18 minutes ago
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> It's about spending your time where it truly matters.

I think the author conflates productivity with meaningfulness.

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rellfy
5 minutes ago
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Well, I think the author correctly identifies productivity as a vector instead of a scalar.

But perhaps a better title would be "Productivity Isn't (Only) About Going Faster"

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chii
5 minutes ago
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productivity is meaningfulness but for somebody else.
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protocolture
5 minutes ago
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productivity is stored in the balls
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gkcalat
52 minutes ago
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Curious how companies measure developers productivity in the era of vide engineering... Token usage? Lines of code? Features shipped? Bug fixed? Code health? Maybe we should use amount of code read or PRs reviewed? Or another metric that would correlate with the amount of person's accountability?
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simonw
29 minutes ago
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Measuring developer productivity has been an unsolved problem for decades already, vibe engineering just makes that unsolved problem feel even harder.
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chii
4 minutes ago
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proxies like customer/revenue growth, complaints/satisfaction and such works imho.
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noitpmeder
7 minutes ago
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"Trust", as unquantifiable as it is, will be the only metric
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twothreeone
41 minutes ago
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Does it matter? The ultimate way to measure productivity is $$$.. companies that generate more $$$ with the same number of "people" are more "productive". Drilling that number down to orgs/teams/ICs is a political endeavor, which means how you do that depends on the result you're looking to generate.
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riknos314
27 minutes ago
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Even if the ultimate measure is dollars most employers will attempt to predict which metrics of employment best correllate with dollars so they can predict how many people to hire
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riknos314
29 minutes ago
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Any claim about "productivity is due to X" that doesn't define a timescale is either flawed or misleading. In fact all measures of anything need to be done across some meaningfully defined time scale to have any relevance.
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localhoster
42 minutes ago
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Companies will tell you that it allows them to examine many directions faster, and in a sense they are right.

Not doing something is much faster than doing it fast. Sit on your ideas, think them trough, dismiss early, or choose to move to implementations.

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Swizec
13 minutes ago
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Productivity is easy to define and measure when you have a an outcome you want to achieve. A goal if you will.

Productivity is impossible to define when you don’t know where you’re going.

A lot of companies and teams are finding out real fast they have zero clue where the fuck they’re trying to go or what they want to achieve. Just a bunch of people running in random directions before the funding runs out.

Pick a direction. Then go fast.

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officialchicken
4 minutes ago
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Oh yeah we're all gonna 11x any day now by reading Linked-In-life posts on HN about slowing down and enjoying the pizza.
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feverzsj
51 minutes ago
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But KPI is.
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diegocg
54 minutes ago
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This is way vague to not be AI slop
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