> The fastest way to kill high levels of productivity is to not value high levels of productivity.
I have not found that to be true. In my experience the fastest way to kill productivity is to measure it incorrectly & incentivize bad behavior chasing the wrong thing.
Everyone values productivity but virtually no one has a good way to measure it, at least not in software.
I want to point out that you and sheepmullet are not exactly in disagreement.
You can't value high productivity if you don't recognize it when you see it, so any workplace that satisfies your first criterion will also satisfy sheepmullet's.
I once worked at a place that used spreadsheet workbooks to track developer activity down to the second and used SLoC as a management metric. It was the least productive workplace I have ever seen. Paid for by ~= $7M per year of the US federal budget, and returning a CRUD app that was probably still outperformed by folders in a file cabinet. A year of work by 12 "developers" might replace one paper form.
High productivity was interpreted as a threat to the gravy train. In retrospect, I should not have suggested that everyone on the team read _Code Complete_, because it just painted a target on my back.
I have not found that to be true. In my experience the fastest way to kill productivity is to measure it incorrectly & incentivize bad behavior chasing the wrong thing.
Everyone values productivity but virtually no one has a good way to measure it, at least not in software.