Did you notice how low productivity of programmers can be sometimes? I mean, it is not uncommon to see developers in large software companies doing very little or almost nothing at all.

I want to be very clear – I do not mean that the entire industry is flawed, there are certainly some amount of people and teams who work hard, I mean really hard. That’s of course great, but we need to acknowledge that a lot of programmers do not perform nearly as much as they can. I think experienced devs can agree with my either because of their large lifetime experience, or because of this, or this, or even this:

So the question is – how exactly is happening and why it is so? Well, I think I have my own theory on that I’d like to share, and perhaps even more important – what I think we can and should do in this case.

The Failure Of Management.

The first and I think by far the foremost reason – in Software, it is practically almost impossible to measure the developer productivity, or at least this is what we are being taught.

There were a lot of attempts, such as

• Measuring the amount of lines of code written
• Measuring the story points delivered
• Measuring the amount of PRs
• …

And all of them are highly biased, like insanely biased, and can be easily abused. I’ll not get into the ways of cracking these metrics, because I think we all can agree that they have some significant problems.

To beat the dead horse, we have to acknowledge that in general, management in software do not deeply understand the work the people are doing. And that’s fine because management have other important things to do, such as meetings, budget planning, reporting etc. Moreover, they likely have very limited expertise in software in general, so even if they would want – they won’t be able to understand the details of what every programmer is actually doing.

So, because of these two reasons:

• There are no reliable indirect ways to measure developers productivity
• And the direct ways are not feasible for the managers

We have this problem. And the problem, if we would formulate it correctly – in most cases in large companies, the management simple do not have a clue on what every developer is doing on their place at all.

So, having that, what is the consequence?