Is There a Better Way to Measure Productivity and Progress?
It is generally easy to identify how any reward system motivates unintended and/or undesired results. Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to provide better systems because these alternatives often have their own advantages and disadvantages, including their own side effects or unintended consequences. In other words, it is easier to criticize and find fault with any proposed system than it is to come up with a better system. I have read about many proposed alternatives to using lines of code as a metric and they all have their own problems and disadvantages. No matter what system we use to measure our progress and our efficiency, we can always keep in mind that these numbers are far from absolute or clear. Instead, focus should be on “orders of magnitude” and the realization that not all lines of code are created equal. Other factors to consider include the difficulty coding a particular problem, languages used, newness of the technology, and the other many inadequacies of this me
