> ALL OF IT is meaningless. It's a pointless discussion.
That is a nihilistic take. That it's pointless and everything about the domain (measurement of productivity) is meaningless.
"Productivity" is no more made up of a concept than "good work". The fact that many attempts to measure it are quite dumb (e.g., the idea of using LOC as a metric) does not mean the whole idea is not worth considering or discussing.
> In practical terms, "productivity" is any metric that people with power can manipulate (cheating numbers, changing narratives, etc) to affect behavior of others to their interests.
Metrics can be gamed, and to me this is the deepest flaw in accepting that metrics can even tell something meaningful.
It is a nuanced discussion, and it's not entirely dismissals. It's just that to enter it, one must accept the reason why productivity metrics exist in the first place (even if provisionally, just for the sake of the argument).
It might sound nihilistic (what does that even mean in this context? anyway), but it's not.
There are lot of good discussions about what good work actually means. I'm dismissing productivity discussions, not the whole set of belief systems.