Productivity
Companies Need a Better Read on What Their Workers Actually Do
In a business world upended by remote work and AI, bosses are searching for new ways to measure productivity.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter Inc. in October 2022, he bemoaned what he saw as its bloated ranks of software engineers, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography. If all 2,500 of them wrote just three lines of code each per day, he reasoned, that would be “enough for a whole operating system.”
It was the prelude to mass layoffs at the social media company, now known as X. But Musk ended up asking some of the fired workers to come back—effectively acknowledging that the calculus of inputs and outputs wasn’t as simple as he’d made out.