In a recent post on the Extreme Programming mailing list, June Kim describes a productive Korean software development workplace that emphasizes “humanity”, and points out that the average developer effort is about 16 hours per week. As opposed to the national average of 50-60 hours per week.

This nominal efficiency is compared, favorably, to this graph of hours worked annually vs. GNP, identified by nation.

I wonder what might happen if we subdivided the national “dots” into components. In particular, where would US graduate students end up? Faculty?

I do wonder whether productivity, estimated by GNP, is the right thing to be measuring here. In some sense, personal satisfaction might be more telling in my experiment, less for June’s….