> There's no reason programmers work can't be measured
> or evaluated. Managers just don't make any attempt
to
> do so. They don't check up on you, and THEIR
> managers don't check up on them, and the chain goes
> all the way up.
While that's certainly true in some shops, it's not the case in others. Right now, I think programming is at the craft stage of manufacturing: individuals or small teams are responsible for entire projects or products, despite their managers' claims to the contrary. The only realistic metric of programmer productivity is time to completion of the project, and since we don't have a good way to measure the complexity of a project, it's a near worthless one. There have been other metrics, but of the two that come to mind, lines of code produced is obviously stupid, and nobody's ever been able to explain to me what a function point is.
In my career memory, every attempt to introduce a metric for programmer productivity has been part of an attempt change programming from craft-type manufacture to industrial, assembly line manufacture. And they've all failed.
Would it be too vulgar Marxist of me to suggest that craft/guild working conditions for most programmers accounts for their reactionary political consciousness? -- Curtiss Leung
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