Measuring employee productivity
You keep hearing about those hyper-productive coding sessions, where people are capable of producing thousands of lines of almost perfect code on the daily basis, and thus qualify for “genius” title appended to their name. But the guy who is capable of producing really good DirectX code might have a trouble with generating good sorting algorithms, and even though he can do it, it’d take him longer than the guy across the cubicle farm, who had the sorting routines as his senior project.
Measuring employee productivity is both an efficiency and project management issue. The corporation, theoretically, is interested in saving resources by firing, let’s say, 10% of its least productive people and re-assigning work to 10% of new hires that might or might not bring the required productivity. Is employee productivity an exact science or is it just a myth carefully nurtured by business schools, so that efficiency experts from Office Space could get a job?
I’ve started reading this collection of articles and documents from Intel. Intel, out of all companies? Well, in a nutshell, Intel is somewhat interested in selling you a bunch of PCs, so they tout their technology as a way to improve employee productivity. To improve something you must measure it first, so that you don’t end up like me and my Atkins diet, where I didn’t weigh myself at the beginning to figure out how many pounds I’ve really lost. Lots of research, whitepapers and best practices, should be an interesting read.