Ask HN: How does Google measure programmer productivity?

15 points

13 years ago

There was an article [1] on Quartz yesterday that says, "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."

I'm hoping someone from Google can chime in and say whether Google's really measuring each employee's productivity, and, if so, how they're doing it.

I've been involved in efforts to measure my team's productivity using function point analysis and LoC measurements, but both felt like bogus measures.

It doesn't seem like Google would use either of these measures, given their engineering culture, so I'm genuinely curious as to how they do it.

[1] http://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/

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