The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering.
Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.
Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.
I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.
Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.
Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.
I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.