

The net negative producing programmer [pdf] - aditya
http://www.pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf

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bsaunder
There's something wrong with this whole line of thinking. Perhaps its the
measuring of productivity by loc, or pages of documentation written (shudder).
Or maybe its the strong negative tone of the whole document.

Maybe it's me, but if a manager can't figure out the good and the bad
performers in the group and figure out how to get the most of the resources
available, then perhaps the most useful change would be at the management
level.

Get to know your people. Look at their code, talk to them about ideas. Are
they producing? Is there resentment among the group?

Please don't measure productivity by loc/day or worse yet pages of
documentation. Short and sweet can be _much_ more productive than overly
verbose and redundant.

~~~
lief79
From what I've heard and read, it tends to have more to do with the manager
either not working closely with the individuals and/or not understanding what
they are doing. This is especially common when it's a non-developer managing
the group.

The best measure of productivity is the amount of functionality added and the
number of bugs produced. Secondary metrics would be the same two numbers for
when someone else makes the changes. Of course, the real trick is in
accurately gauging the difficulty of the tasks.

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gaius
I am really suspicious of these 100:1 metrics because I don't think they're
across the board. That is - they apply to different people at different times.
Let me give you an example. One thing I do at work is crunch numbers and make
predictions. I do this a lot, and I can grab data from all over the place,
parse it or munge it, fit curves, draw graphs, show how two or more datasets
are correlated, package all this into a nice report, schedule it to run
regularly or generate the report in response to some event, blah blah.
Sometimes I can turn around requests in just a few minutes because I have a
ton of Python I've already written, I know where to find all the data, and so
on. Another _equally talented_ person could take a week or two to do some of
this stuff, if they started from scratch and didn't have my mathematical
background. And there's stuff they can do that I'd be so much slower at. For
any given task, 100:1 differences in performance between team members is
_normal_. Over time, tho', over a range of tasks, I doubt there's even a 5:1
difference within most teams, maybe not even 2:1.

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bitdiddle
isn't the NNPP the reason middle management exists :)

