Another refinement of these outcome-oriented techniques is using organizational economic output as the outcome, such as a company’s earnings. The main advantage of this approach is that economic output is arguably the most direct measure of productivity, at least at a large scale—if a developer’s work does not produce profit directly or indirectly, are they really being productive? The disadvantages of this approach is that, as Ramírez and Nembhard point out, tracing profits down to individual knowledge workers is difficult and also that present economic output is not necessarily indicative of
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