Measuring your own productivity for your own purposes: Not really much point; people tend to match their level of performance with their levels of desire and skill. Dollars earned is a lagging metric but it's probably the best one.
Measuring the productivity of others (say, your employees): Goals met versus goals set (by you), assuming you're realistic in measuring the median rate of goal achievement in a pool of available talent. That's pretty hard to get right, particularly when delays aren't always employee-related (servers go down, your supplier's software had a bug in it nobody noticed until your employee had to track it down).
Nobody much here is in the business of managing throngs of interchangeable laborers; you're usually lucky to have the talent you retain and are constantly trying to fill positions created by company growth and by turnover. Unless a coder really disappoints by any metric, you're not likely to fire a less-than-median performer because replacing them is so difficult, so a measurement of productivity tends not to be something you can do anything with.
A much more interesting question is how you can maximize productivity for both cases.
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[ 18.2 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadI basically break down my tasks into stuff that can be done in a few hours.
Measuring the productivity of others (say, your employees): Goals met versus goals set (by you), assuming you're realistic in measuring the median rate of goal achievement in a pool of available talent. That's pretty hard to get right, particularly when delays aren't always employee-related (servers go down, your supplier's software had a bug in it nobody noticed until your employee had to track it down).
Nobody much here is in the business of managing throngs of interchangeable laborers; you're usually lucky to have the talent you retain and are constantly trying to fill positions created by company growth and by turnover. Unless a coder really disappoints by any metric, you're not likely to fire a less-than-median performer because replacing them is so difficult, so a measurement of productivity tends not to be something you can do anything with.
A much more interesting question is how you can maximize productivity for both cases.
It's software development centric but the idea is very interesting for measuring personal performance and productivity.