&gt;  we don&#x27;t currently have appropriate metrics for productivity in a market increasingly based on information<p>I like this xkcd comic for a great representation of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1629&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1629&#x2F;</a><p>How, exactly, do you quantify the productivity of someone who makes some obscure library for a tool that provides monitoring services for some other utility that...<p>Hell, my own job is hard enough to quantify. I do defect analysis at Intel, looking for defects in chips with a scanning electron microscope. Sure, my output of samples is pretty easy to track, but what&#x27;s the actual productivity of my work? I am one very, very small cog in a very, very big machine that somehow shits out fantastically small computer chips at the end. How important is my role? Er, I&#x27;m not quite sure. All I know is that I&#x27;m paid good money for what I do, and I work 12-hour shifts and am frequently asked to work overtime. But not once have I been told, &quot;Hey, thanks to the defects that you and your team found, we got the information needed to increase wafer yield by X! You&#x27;re doing great work!&quot; Nope. Chips come in, pictures go out, engineers do Stuff with those pictures, and that&#x27;s about as far as I can tell.<p>How do you measure the productivity of my work? The engineers who use the data I create to tell other people to make changes in the process? The guys who make the tools that I use to do all of this? The janitor who cleans the wastebaskets of the guys who make said tools? We keep going farther and farther down the rabbit hole, and it doesn&#x27;t get any clearer.