
Ask HN: How does Google measure programmer productivity? - nopal
There was an article [1] on Quartz yesterday that says, &quot;Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and the level of productivity that teams are expected to deliver assumes that employees are working on their primary responsibilities 100% of the time.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m hoping someone from Google can chime in and say whether Google&#x27;s really measuring each employee&#x27;s productivity, and, if so, how they&#x27;re doing it.<p>I&#x27;ve been involved in efforts to measure my team&#x27;s productivity using function point analysis and LoC measurements, but both felt like bogus measures.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem like Google would use either of these measures, given their engineering culture, so I&#x27;m genuinely curious as to how they do it.<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;115831&#x2F;googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead&#x2F;
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ja27
At one company, my boss got talked into trying to count LoC so that the
combined QA testing / customer support organization could charge their costs
against each development team in proportion to their code size. Our team spent
the next week cleaning up and removing code left and right. I think we easily
chopped away more than 25% of the lines in our codebase. After the first
weekly LoC total report, that effort faded away.

I think the only time I've felt like I could actually show my boss any measure
of productivity from our teams is when we were trying to follow SCRUM
reasonably closely and it was easy enough to show who had allegedly completed
what during each and every sprint. I did have to juggle to make sure that each
person showed enough hours, which was a pain because we'd assign a task to a
single person no matter how much collaboration it took.

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codeonfire
I had this same question. I don't think anyone is going to be able to answer
because I think the answer is probably political bickering behind closed
doors. Productivity is open to interpretation and it determines who gets money
and who's boss gets money. The perception of productivity is at the core of
politics at a place like Google.

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lgomezma
I was actually wondering the same. Maybe they have to build X number of
features of fix Y number of bugs?

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nopal
I'm genuinely curious. Core premise of the article is that Google is
abandoning 20% time because they have these metrics in place and management
places so much value in them. If the articles correct, the measurement they're
using is having a huge financial and technological impact on one of the most
successful software companies around.

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ghostdiver
What happens when someone is underperforming?

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winter_blue
At Google, they get put on a "Performance Improvement Plan", which is really
intended to give you enough to find another job and resign (rather than get
fired). I don't think they actually expect anyone on a PIP to have a rise in
performance and to stay on board.

