[shaldengeki]

I don't think this article, or the underlying claims, are (yet) credible. I'm disappointed that the Washington Post wrote about this at all, and that people I respect a lot have amplified it on Twitter.

The claims come from an MBA student graduating from Stanford this year, who plans on starting a developer tooling company. [1] The faculty member (a professor of psychology) who supported this work doesn't comment at all on the claims made by the student; their single quote in the article instead emphasizes how difficult it is to measure productivity.

The claims are based on, from their own description, unpublished ongoing research. There's no description of what data they gathered, what their methods were, or how they assessed accuracy anywhere. (For starters: how did they identify who a software engineer was in each of the companies in their dataset? How did they exclude data scientists, or technical writers, or other engineering-adjacent folks who in some companies need to commit infrequently? How did they identify remote workers, and handle workers transitioning between roles or working arrangements?)

Without this extremely basic information, I think it makes sense to just ignore it. It's possible that it'll eventually pan out as real! But definitely not yet. Wild that people are taking it seriously.

[1] https://poetsandquants.com/2023/02/21/from-middle-school-dro...