-2000 Lines of Code
Just the other day I was in my logistics class and the professor started deviating into something that I believe was pure nonsense.<p>He started the lecture by analyzing how many pieces a machine could manufacture per day. Fair enough. He extended the model to measure different ratios of capacity. Makes sense.<p>Then he tried to extend the model to all machines, including humans. His example was: &quot;How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?&quot;. I thought it was a trick question, so I answered (paraphrasing) &quot;You can&#x27;t answer that question the same way you answer for the machine. You can&#x27;t give a single metric.&quot; He told me I was wrong and that the _right_ measure would be (total number of working hours&#x2F;day).<p>I was tempted to try to convince him otherwise. The analogy was deeply flawed. He certainly measured the machines in (number of pieces &#x2F; day) but measured the legal team in (hours&#x2F;day). So, in analyzing a machine, you take into account its efficiency, but you don&#x27;t do the same thing for humans.<p>I believe that is exactly the same thing that is going on in the post. Managers&#x2F;Logistics&#x2F;Economists are very susceptible to this kind of generalization pitfalls.<p>Edit: Given that this answer has generated some discussion I feel the need to expand on it. The legal team was not expected to sell their services &quot;by the hour&quot;. In fact, any discussion about how their services were sold was shut down by the professor. From his point of view, the lawyers were machines and he was asking the question &quot;how much can this machine produce?&quot;<p>Yes, other students also suggested taking the number of billable hours&#x2F;revenue into account, but that&#x27;s not the answer the professor was looking for.<p>I don&#x27;t criticize whether his answer is not <i>technically</i> right, but I feel it holds no real-world meaning. It was a purely academic question that leads nowhere instead of having a debate about how you measure the productivity of a group of human beings. And on top of that, his final answer was definitive and (from his point of view) was irrefutable.