-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: "How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?". I thought it was a trick question, so I answered (paraphrasing) "You can't answer that question the same way you answer for the machine. You can't give a single metric." He told me I was wrong and that the _right_ measure would be (total number of working hours/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 / day) but measured the legal team in (hours/day). So, in analyzing a machine, you take into account its efficiency, but you don't do the same thing for humans.<p>I believe that is exactly the same thing that is going on in the post. Managers/Logistics/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 "by the hour". 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 "how much can this machine produce?"<p>Yes, other students also suggested taking the number of billable hours/revenue into account, but that's not the answer the professor was looking for.<p>I don'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.