Max Kanat-Alexander writes about software design, debugging, developer productivity and open source community, drawing on his work at Google.
HN links it as the author's own blog and as background on engineering productivity work; commenters give little opinion of it.
Sort of, yeah. See https://testing.googleblog.com/2017/04/code-health-googles-internal-code.html as one of the examples of a type of Engineering Productivity work that I do at Google (although as you have basically pointed out, there are reasons we avoided that word for the work that I do, although I still think it falls under the broader umbrella).
It seems like the thing that you're worried about (I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, this is just the sense I get from your post) is people hiring a sketchy consultant to come in and have everybody follow some process whether or not it has anything to do with their work or making things actually better. I'm definitely also opposed to stuff like that and I've made a few jokes or snide comments about it here and there on the blog, in http://www.codesimplicity.com/book/, and on my Twitter feed.
You are welcome!! The author also blogs at https://www.codesimplicity.com/