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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I think the weakness of this study is that it's still all self-reported. I know a lot of people who would label themselves "productive" who I might not consider productive in an objective sense.

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Not entirely true. By my reading, there were a number of psychometric tests done at the beginning and end of the period, finding some effects on attitude and focus that appeared uncorrelated to the self reported results.

Are there any psychometric tests that are useful?

What is a good way to measure productivity?

# lines codes. no of pomodoros/day.

...where the fewer lines are written to achieve a well-working solution, the better.

Perhaps, but measuring productivity by lines of code is a problem only if there are incentives tied to the metric: if you have a system with other incentives and have two people working in the same language, lines of code is a perfectly reasonable way to judge the productivity of a programmer.

Nope. Things can be solved any number of ways. Often a simple solution with minor changes is better than a quicky designed bandaid with 10 times the LOC

It can be a metric, but it doesn't indicate productivity by itself. It's hard to use even correlated to other metrics, but loses its value if compared out of context and without knowing the code quality

that shouldn't change day by day ?

Ofcourse noone an help you if you are trying to cheat your own system.

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

which in reality, is a pretty effective way to do it. Really. (speaking of airplanes)

This is ridiculous. More LoC != productivity. If anything, you make your future teammate's life miserable, when they inherit your technical debt.

If your goal units are newline characters or alarm bells ringing, possibly.

The plural of anecdote is data ;)

The plural of anecdote is "anecdotes." The singular of data is "datum."

Thanks for that clarification.

It's a somewhat well-known quote that gets interpreted all sorts of ways.

https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-a...

Indeed it is well-known (albeit apocryphally for most), mostly as the source of the rejoinder "the plural of anecdote is not data" which is rather more well-known among those who do analytics and is more correct at least in regards to the common definitions of "anecdote."

Woooosh...

Only if it’s gathered in a structured way.

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