Productivity isn't about going faster

5/12/2026 at 6:57:35 AM

Cute, but make up your own term instead of polluting the existing one.

> For instance, would you really want to speed up time spent with your loved ones?

First of, do you really think about productivity when doing the positive thing you imply here? But also, for some less pleasant activities with your loved ones - yes, of course you want to speed it up to have more time for something better!

by eviks

5/12/2026 at 6:06:05 AM

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. What can I really do that matters?

Make money? It’s gone eventually. Be remembered? I’ll eventually be forgotten. Be REALLY remembered? I’ll be forgotten in a few thousand years. Become immortal? All entropy in the universe eventually dissipates.

What I can do though, is have a good time with the people I love.

by ninjahawk1

5/12/2026 at 6:42:17 AM

Work hard so that the next generation is better off than you were, cascading down for generations to come.

I’ve heard it said that the meaning of life is to plant trees for shade that you will never personally be able to enjoy.

by jimbob45

5/12/2026 at 6:18:27 AM

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by anal_reactor

5/12/2026 at 5:14:19 AM

Curious how companies measure developers productivity in the era of vide engineering... Token usage? Lines of code? Features shipped? Bug fixed? Code health? Maybe we should use amount of code read or PRs reviewed? Or another metric that would correlate with the amount of person's accountability?

by gkcalat

5/12/2026 at 10:57:26 AM

My company (primarily a software company with 100k+ employees) went back to measuring lines of code.

Managers have a literal orgwide leaderboard now of how many LOCs were committed by each IC. As expected, right after they started doing this, there were a lot of frivolous refactoring projects where people moved code from one repo to another repo or consolidated stuff into a common repo, just to boost their LOCs.

by roncesvalles

5/12/2026 at 5:37:33 AM

Measuring developer productivity has been an unsolved problem for decades already, vibe engineering just makes that unsolved problem feel even harder.

by simonw

5/12/2026 at 6:22:53 AM

Measuring “single developer productivity” is unsolved problem. It also is not a problem unless you are pointy haired boss and want to plan bonuses based on that or fire people based on that.

You definitely can measure team output over time and have some idea. Compare team to what they did in last 6 months and you have your measure for having idea how much can be achieved next month. But you cannot not plan like what can be achieved in longer period just next sprint or two.

This said you cannot compare teams like that.

by ozim

5/12/2026 at 6:02:05 AM

proxies like customer/revenue growth, complaints/satisfaction and such works imho.

by chii

5/12/2026 at 6:44:32 AM

Missing part of discussion is “what for?”.

To make personnel decisions who to fire or give bonuses it doesn’t work. Just as lines of code don’t. If any of those indicators is lacking you have to dig deeper.

What lazy managers want is a single number they don’t have to dig into to make decisions. Lines of code, story points, bug counts.

To plan work for next sprint having last 6 months of stats gives quite good idea what can be achieved. But story points or stats are not useful for telling if specific features will be developed in specific timeframe.

by ozim

5/12/2026 at 6:31:49 AM

How can you assign revenue growth to a particular feature?

Even if the customer tells you they bought your product because you added widget x you can't really be sure.

So much of this stuff is emotional rather than rational.

by tonyedgecombe

5/12/2026 at 5:24:56 AM

Does it matter? The ultimate way to measure productivity is $$$.. companies that generate more $$$ with the same number of "people" are more "productive". Drilling that number down to orgs/teams/ICs is a political endeavor, which means how you do that depends on the result you're looking to generate.

by twothreeone

5/12/2026 at 6:09:08 AM

True, but the relationship is certainly not linear and not a Markov process. Also, the $$$ a company makes are rarely directly translated to incentives for developers. I remember a case where a company was doing an OK engineering/product job, but had problems with sales. Then a new sales driven CEO came into place and for the next 3-5 years the company had great financial results, while at the same time eroding the engineering culture (who cares if money is flowing anyway). Then that guy left and the next CEOs had to take care of the mess.

by kavalg

5/12/2026 at 5:39:39 AM

Even if the ultimate measure is dollars most employers will attempt to predict which metrics of employment best correllate with dollars so they can predict how many people to hire

by riknos314

5/12/2026 at 9:35:37 AM

defenetly a big strugglez.. we are working with researchers on that actually..

I think a descent answer is a cross-factor one.

We have agile teams, that have a velocity measured in story points. This gives a first good idea but it is not the all truth. It is a very relative measurment.

but if you add informations about pure productions : Number of PR's Number of commits in PR's Number of code lines Number of comments on PR's

Then you got something more interesting.

Also, we are looking for a way to add quality indicators to understand if it is just rush, or full vibe coded code that will make project los t in few months ..

But I agree with other comments saying that it is a struggle, and AI coding just make more painful ..

by pjmalandrino

5/12/2026 at 5:59:33 AM

"Trust", as unquantifiable as it is, will be the only metric

by noitpmeder

5/12/2026 at 3:54:31 PM

I've never heard this before, but it seems very insightful to me.

by msteffen

5/12/2026 at 6:05:15 AM

This rings very true as an industry. We are all extremely busy, producing billions of lines of code, and yet the software around us isn't really getting any better.

What we'd need instead is concerted simplification. But that ain't gonna happen.

by joelthelion

5/12/2026 at 12:16:01 PM

I've been thinking about that recently too. The original drive behind the whole "worse is better" movement was that the software should remain simple and solve a simple problem. It's better for the software to do one small thing well than get bloated with unneeded features.

In a world where any change I want is a prompt away, writing high quality, simple software becomes an exercise in conscientious restraint.

by terrabitz

5/12/2026 at 5:37:20 AM

Any claim about "productivity is due to X" that doesn't define a timescale is either flawed or misleading. In fact all measures of anything need to be done across some meaningfully defined time scale to have any relevance.

by riknos314

5/12/2026 at 5:24:36 AM

Companies will tell you that it allows them to examine many directions faster, and in a sense they are right.

Not doing something is much faster than doing it fast. Sit on your ideas, think them trough, dismiss early, or choose to move to implementations.

by localhoster

5/12/2026 at 5:52:58 AM

Productivity is easy to define and measure when you have a an outcome you want to achieve. A goal if you will.

Productivity is impossible to define when you don’t know where you’re going.

A lot of companies and teams are finding out real fast they have zero clue where the fuck they’re trying to go or what they want to achieve. Just a bunch of people running in random directions before the funding runs out.

Pick a direction. Then go fast.

by Swizec

5/12/2026 at 6:09:44 AM

I mean the headline is great! I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about "you can't execute your way out of a bad strategy" (which I claim the original "you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet" is a special case of)

by msteffen

5/12/2026 at 5:14:58 AM

But KPI is.

by feverzsj

5/12/2026 at 5:11:56 AM

This is way vague to not be AI slop

by diegocg

5/12/2026 at 6:02:53 AM

Oh yeah we're all gonna 11x any day now by reading Linked-In-life posts on HN about slowing down and enjoying the pizza.

by officialchicken

5/12/2026 at 5:48:19 AM

> It's about spending your time where it truly matters.

I think the author conflates productivity with meaningfulness.

by l5870uoo9y

5/12/2026 at 11:02:45 AM

Productivity isn't about doing things faster as a lot of people erroneously believe (that's efficiency). Productivity isn't just efficiency * time_spent_working either.

Productivity is about how quickly you're progressing towards your high-level objective. Having a knack (or methodology) for knowing what to do is way more important than doing things fast.

by roncesvalles

5/12/2026 at 6:01:27 AM

Well, I think the author correctly identifies productivity as a vector instead of a scalar.

But perhaps a better title would be "Productivity Isn't (Only) About Going Faster"

by rellfy

5/12/2026 at 6:00:57 AM

productivity is meaningfulness but for somebody else.

by chii

5/12/2026 at 6:00:54 AM

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by protocolture

5/12/2026 at 6:11:27 AM

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by ffsm8

5/12/2026 at 6:13:29 AM

I have so many thoughts on the 5 or 6 things this article touched on and they're all jumbled together into this cat poster of an article.

Productivity, prioritization, efficiency, control, purpose, happiness...

I'll just rant about one: Control.

> you can’t decide to kick the ball, nor score a goal, or much less win the game; you can only decide to move your leg.

If you couldn't control how you win the game, why the f is Messi Messi?

You can see what the field is doing. Where the other team is moving, pointing, gaps in the defense, where your team is currently, how to utilize your next move of run, pass, or kick. You do decide to kick the ball, score a goal and win a game by fighting with everything you have because the opposite is true. You can absolutely throw a game by actively sabotaging everything.

The spirit of what is written about Control is "don't worry about what you don't control, one being the result. Just worry about and do what you can" (which i agree with) but it's said so poorly.

My disdain towards this article... Why are we accepting cat posters on Hnews homepage?

by irjustin

5/12/2026 at 6:20:05 AM

To be fair it doesn't say "you can't score a goal" or "you can't kick the ball", it says you can only decide to _try_ to do that. But agree it's not that deep as they seem to think, you can take this line of thinking further as much as you want (you can try to move your leg but perhaps due to injury or external blockage it won't move; so all you can really do is "desire" not "decide"? Is there some very deep meaning to this? And what even is this "you" that we are talking about?)

by virgilp

5/12/2026 at 6:21:02 AM

> My disdain towards this article... Why are we accepting cat posters on Hnews homepage?

Because it's still miles better than the majority of AI slop being posted here (see current FP which has "Why code in Python")...

We've reached a point in humanity where even empty platitudes is still more profound than the majority of essays being created.

by lelanthran

5/12/2026 at 6:15:20 AM

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by hona_mind

5/12/2026 at 6:43:30 AM

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by kitbot