On: Engineering productivity can be measured, just not...

[TheOtherHobbes]

Because measuring money is hard and it's not easy to apportion credit.

Person A has an interesting-but-not-exceptional idea and gets Person B to fund it. People C, D, and E code it.

For most interesting-but-not-exceptional ideas you could replace all of these people with others.

If you actually ran this an experiment in a Monte Carlo-but-real kind of a way, you'd find some collaborations would do well, some would do badly, some would fail completely, a few might explode (in a good way).

How do you quantify the value of the relative contributions?

[NotPavlovsDog → TheOtherHobbes]

We've run a variety of experiments that worked for us. What is important is implementing the question in a way that works for the organization.

How shall we quantify value, and how much of that index will affect compensation.

It's answering the question "why do some people get paid more" in a transparent way.