Archive for September, 2006

On India’s Growth Story and Socialism Dying Hard

Posted September 29, 2006 * Comments(0)

NY Times reports on India’s Torrid Growth. Some excerpts (highlight mine):


Quote:

India is now growing faster than most other economies in the world, and is close to rivaling China, whose emergence as a manufacturing center has left India racing to catch up.

…

In a study published in May, the World Bank said, “It is easy to be optimistic about India’s economic prospects, but there is growing concern that the basic institutions, organizations, and structures for public sector action are failing — especially for those at the bottom.”

…

Still, economists and analysts warned that by itself, business dynamism is not enough for the long term. The high growth rate could taper off if the liberalization campaign of the 1990’s is not followed by a second wave of policy changes to share wealth more equitably and make it easier to invest and do business in India, the World Bank report on India warned.

If those policy changes are slow in coming, it is in part because the Congress Party-led governing coalition is beholden to the communist parties whose votes it needs to muster a majority in parliament. The communists oppose most of the measures that investors are calling for, including sales of government stakes in businesses, relaxing labor laws and opening the banking and insurance industries to foreign takeovers and competition.

“Has the pace of reform slowed down a bit? Yeah, it probably has,” Franklin Lavin, the American Undersecretary of Commerce for international trade, said by telephone from Washington. “Frankly,” he added, “you find more hangover socialism in India than in China. You don’t find someone arguing against you on the basis of Marxism in China.”

That highlighted quote captures the paradox of India. There is a small, but influential minority in India that is wedded to a romantic version of socialism, the “fabian socialism” of 1920’s UK. I have some close friends in that camp, and for them growing inequality only validates their socialist theories. Accoring to them, the fact that India stagnated for 40+ years and went nowhere economically with socialism is because, well, “we never really practiced real socialism” (thank God!). Socialism got Indianized, and became a gentle, bureaucratic beast, causing stagnation, keeping people in poverty, but not inflicting any obvious extra misery, at least none that anyone could directly attribute to it. The fact that India never experienced the horrors of Stalinist purges nor a Cultural Revolution means that romantic illusions could be nurtured without the harsh dose of reality getting in the way.

Now, with the Reserve Bank of India fully committed to the Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan program of unlimited, easy liquidity - to sterilize the deluge of dollars coming India’s way - India’s growth, just as America’s, is extremely lopsided. Credit-fueled specualtion, recently finding home in the spectacular real estate boom in India, pays far better than any kind of productive economic activity. The result is rising inequality, which socialists seize on to have their “I told you so” moment. Result: real economic reform is stalled, and freedom is the loser.

Measuring Programmer Productivity

Posted September 23, 2006 * Comments(1)

I often get sales pitches from vendors offering to sell us tools to measure programmer productivity. Typically these tools tend to be plug-ins to various IDEs, version control systems and the like. They may get fancy, and assign different weight to comments, white space, and lines that contain just a bracket, like

{

or even detect duplicate code - to give low weightage to cut-and-paste jobs - but in the end, they are basically measuring lines of code.

Once you start measuring “output” that way, you will tend to get a lot of “output”. Whether that output has value is a different matter. This is a basic Heisenberg problem (you will get a lot of whatever it is that you are measuring!), and I believe there is no escaping it.

I came across a company that proudly displays the fact that they measure every key stroke of the programmmer, and keep a webcam focused on them all the time as they work. I bet very smart people love to work under that system, and they get a lot of “productivity” out of them too. I hear this is a thriving business, particularly in professional services companies, where the quest to measure everything in software development is reaching its absurd limits, so clients can have “perfect visibility” about their projects.

From experience, I have concluded that human beings and measurement systems don’t mix. How do you measure commitment? How do measure passion? How do you measure drive? Yet, those things matter a lot more in productivity than lines of code. It is not a technological problem, and it is not worth thinking about it as “OK, our current system is imperfect, we just need a more perfect measurement system”. We need to rethink the problem fundamentally, or as in Zen terminology, just unask the question of measurement.

So let me ask it directly: Why do we need a measurement system in the first place? Is there a substitute for (very imperfect) human judgement in this area?