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I would say the first step to competency in recruiting and managing developers is if you can tell when a developer is doing a terrible job. That's more importan
by jrumbut 10y ago
I would say the first step to competency in recruiting and managing developers is if you can tell when a developer is doing a terrible job. That's more important and easier, and more prone to objective measures. Someone who commits 100 lines a week may be better than someone who commits 200 lines, but the one who hasn't committed in a month may need some help getting things together.
With hiring as difficult as it is, developers who make any reasonable positive contribution are probably worth keeping.
From there, as a manager, the best thing to do is focus on getting the best out of each developer, and keeping the business profitable enough to be able to give raises that would make anyone happy.
- danellis 10y ago> but the one who hasn't committed in a month may need some help getting things together. They might, but on the other hand they might be the one who decided that the project needed documenting properly, or who is researching and designing the next feature. Not all useful work involves writing code.
- Bartweiss 10y agoThis is a good reminder that performance on any metric needs to be tied to decent communication. A problem like this can easily be fixed with "hey, what're you working on?" "oh, this ream of important documentation", but far too often that never happens.