Ah, yes. McKinsey, where management advice goes to die (after being billed).

I've been involved in I think 4 McKinsey "interventions" in my career. 2 were outright harmful, and the other 2 were merely a massive waste of money and time.

Can you measure software productivity? Well, maybe, depending on how you *define* productivity. For sure, you can't apply any naive metric; the real wizards in any given organization are the ones who might spend a day making the proverbial chalk mark where the part isn't working, where nobody else even knows where to look.

There's a wonderful book, which is alas in a storage unit at the moment and I can't find the name, about measurement and organizational dysfunction. The thrust is that if what one measures isn't aligned with the organization's goals, and the latter is very often misunderstood, one will lose track of the organization's goals and favor the (organizationally irrelevant) measurable metrics. In simple words, the drunk under the lamp-post syndrome. "I dropped them over there, but the light is better here."

I suspect that too many productivity measurers imagine (or hope!) that software is linear, akin to piecework like making skirts or hats. Alas for them, it's not. Software is everywhere discontinuous and so is software development - especially when it's bug fixing.

Older couple here (60's), and IMO it's because today's sound editors don't actually give a shit about speech. We'll be listening and the sound track is thunderous, but the dialogue under it is inaudible. It's like the old Charlie Brown scenes in school. Whaw waw whaw wahw whaw? Wwahw waw.

I'd love to get my hands on some of those sound editors and give them a hearty slap upside the head.

This, exactly.

Hours worked is a bogus metric. I bet at least 1/3 of those office hours were spent BS'ing with co-workers, flirting with the hot new guy or girl, thinking about lunch, recovering from lunch, sitting in useless meetings where you actually had to be present (as opposed to just checking in with zoom), etc.

Of course, all of what you said is completely irrelevant to what's going on.

NO individual weights are being collected. Air New Zealand ISN'T doing this for billing purposes. It's the NZ CAA (the equivalent of the US FAA) that is attempting to update the averages that they permit airlines to use as an alternative to actually weighing the pax load.

For instance, I believe that the current FAA average weight guideline is 190 pounds in summer and 195 in winter. (I may have the exact figures wrong.) Every now and then, the FAA needs to update those guidelines, and they do it by actually weighing a passenger sampling.

I'm impressed at how poorly the CNN article mis-represents what is being done. I don't know if it's CNN, or ANZ, or both. It's a wonderfully wretched attempt at customer communication.

So the FAA acted 3 days after the crash instead of what, immediately? What's the point here? That the FAA should have knee-jerked and grounded the plane without reviewing the data from 3rd party regulators?

The Lion Air crash was a group effort. If you read the investigation report, it's clear that the airplane was just one slice in the Swiss Cheese accident model. (and no, you don't get to be excused for being one slice, but it's not all your fault either.) Given that, I rather think that if I were a regulator, and heard of the ETH crash, I might want to look into the facts before grounding the airplane.

Hindsight says that Boeing screwed up MCAS. That doesn't make every single related effort culpable.

If by "facts" you mean "lies", well, then, sure. Yet another conservaturd proudly parading delusion as reality.

Late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, bought early in 2014 and still in everyday use. I expect to continue using it until at least its 10th birthday.

Runner-up would be the Sun Ultra 60 that I bought from a going out of business sale for $50 in 2002. I sold it for $50 in I think 2018. I don't count it as longest, though, because for the last 5-6 years it mostly sat there turned off; I only fired it up when dealing with a Solaris-specific issue.

I fooled around with it for a bit, then decided that I had better things to do - like watch golden retrievers on TikTok.

Seriously, I'm not seeing the point.

THAT fallacy has led many a manager down the primrose path of saving money, only to discover that the customer has become the QA person. And the customer isn't happy. And once again, the manage will re-discover the fact that it almost always costs more to fix a fuckup than it does to get it right in the first place.

Maybe you can just compare inputs and outputs if it's a trivial program, like computing Fibonacci numbers or something. Or, maybe if it's a fully stateless, non-concurrent operation. Something like that, I might trust an AI to get right nearly all the time. But then, something like that isn't what you are paying your expensive programmers to do in the first place.

I'm bemused by the number of people who are wishing as hard as they can that THIS time, we'll see a qualitative difference. Fat chance, folks.

10x easier until the AI fscks it up. And since you can't predict when that will happen, it's not really 10x easier, is it?

I can see AI augmentation dealing with a certain amount of boilerplate and busywork. I can also see it leading to some epic disasters when it's depended on without proper vetting.

Typically? I don't think so.

Nothing like inventing "facts" to support a bogus argument.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "properly-designed" office, outside of the one that I have IN MY HOME. OLS in the late 1970's might possibly qualify.

Your hand-waving is nice theory, in a vacuum. It has no basis in any reality I've ever met, and I've worked at a wide variety of companies over the last 45 years.

Ah, there's the misunderstanding. I never said any such thing, and that's not the point of the cited study. The study is about people who will quit if REQUIRED to return to the office willy-nilly.

I refuse to be mandated to return to the office. Left to myself, there are plenty of situations where I want to be face to face. There are plenty more where there's no point.

It's the difference between coercion and invitation.

Clearly you don't understand. There are many paths forward that don't involve "leadership", unless you are defining that word to mean bettering oneself in any way possible.

And you figure that, how? It happens to be true in my case, but only because I passed traditional retirement age quite a while ago. Not interested in leadership is not the same thing as not interested in advancement, or not interested in variety.

Why would you assume that that would surprise me? When did I ever assert that there were things that can't be done from home? One of my own responsibilities happens to be something that is best done face to face, as we found out during the peak of the pandemic.

You seem to have some issues, either with reading comprehension, or excessive and inappropriate projection. You might want to work on that, as it will limit your effectiveness when not in a face to face situation.

Horse puckey.

Two things. First, it's not about hours worked. It's about getting the work done. If J Programmer can get it all done in a 20 hour work week, more power to him. (and if he were properly motivated, he'd probably be working 2X hours and getting 2X done.) I've spent many a lazy sunny summer afternoon on the deck. I'm that much more motivated to work extra that evening, or next morning, or next rainy day.

Second, every WFH I know puts in *more* hours than they did in the office. They aren't wasting an hour+ commuting. The computer is right there and they can work early, late, whenever. If you have a sleepless night, you can get up and get something done, even if it's cleaning out the in-box.

I've notices over the decades that people who accuse "most workers" of being lazy, are probably inclined to be lazy themselves; they think that's how everyone else is.

For bonus points: if a WFH really is dogging it, it shows up in their (lack of) work. It's not hard to figure out.