The Myth of Measurable Productivity

LMAX Exchange

Farnam Street Blog holds up a coding competition as evidence that:

If
you want to make your computer programmers and engineers more effective
give them “privacy, personal space, control over their physical
environments, and freedom from interruption.”

The
only trouble is, the coding competition is fatally flawed as a measure
of normal developer productivity. It’s setup such that developers work
on their own:

Each participant was also assigned a
partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however,
without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be
critical.

So what we actually learn is that if you’re
working by yourself without interacting with anyone else, you will
perform better if you don’t have anyone else around that’s not overly
surprising.

What happens in the real world however is that a team
of developers work together to build software. The research is unable to
shed any light on the conditions that benefit that mode of development
because it measured something completely different.

And this isn’t
the only example experiments are constantly being put forward as
proving or disproving things that affect productivity, but all of them
are fatally flawed in one or both of two key ways:

1. The activity being performed in the experiment is not the same as what we’re trying to optimise in the real world.
2. The
   way they measure productivity is flawed usually because it only
   measures a subset of tasks and attributes that would matter in the real
   world over the long term.

This shouldn’t be surprising, any
repeated task is best optimised by automating it and removing humans
altogether. The remaining work then is dealing with exceptions and is
inherently unique (if the same exception kept happening we’d automate
it). More importantly though, the idea that productivity of modern
office workers can be measured is a myth. Any metrics you put around
productivity are inevitably incomplete and lead to people gaming the
system, working only on the measured parts of productivity and to the
detriment of anything that isn’t measured. Measured productivity goes
up, but those results aren’t reflected in the business’s bottom line
they’re fictional.

The only viable option is to experiment in your
own workplace with your actual work and see what works for you. Use
measurements as a guide but also follow some gut feel to account for the
unmeasurable elements. Maybe individual offices are best for your
workers, doing your work or maybe open plan is. Unless you’re in the
business of completing abstract coding competitions, you probably should
work that out for yourself instead of believing the research.