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Any metric you put on a graph for all to see needs to be something with a direct impact on the company. So happy customers yes, products/features/commits shipp

Any metric you put on a graph for all to see needs to be something with a direct impact on the company. So happy customers yes, products/features/commits shipped, no. Developer performance can not be measured quantitatively. It's okay for a manager to look at these things, but when they go to an underperfoming employee the story always has to be qualitative and personal about the specific work they are doing. It's hard enough to create a culture where everyone is focused on the success of the business without reducing people's work to easily gamed metrics. If you do that, you tacitly send a message that the true quality of their work doesn't matter and then you've shot yourself in the foot big time.

gaius 9y ago
It's hard enough to create a culture where everyone is focused on the success of the business without reducing people No it's easy; make everyone an equity partner.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  It's funny because "aligning employee interests with the company's interests" is probably one of the easiest problems for a business owner to solve, yet it's treated as some holy grail of business knowledge. I once worked with an entrepreneur of a very closely held small business. It was owned exclusively by the entrepreneur and his family, no employee had any share whatsoever, as far as I could tell. He often complained that employees lacked initiative, work ethic, etc. and didn't "treat the business like it was their own". Yep, that's a head scratcher.
  - gaius 9y ago
    My last employer, a vast multinational, exhorted everyone to "think like an owner" but that was kinda hard to do when they referred to every employee as a "resource".
- dasil003 9y ago
  You're hijacking my comment to grandstand on an orthogonal point. Even if everyone has equity, if you put up metrics to measure productivity, they will be gamed, so choose carefully.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I'm not hijacking it; I'm refuting it.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      You are not refuting it, you are cherry-picking one phrase of my comment which is not central to the thesis and pushing your own agenda. That bit of my comment can be completely replaced without affecting my comment but giving you no stone against which to grind your axe. Compensation is one thing, feedback on performance is another. Unless you think everything should be a cooperative with equal ownership and that will magically solve all performance problems, in which case go do that, but I will neither found a company like that nor work for one and I have two decades of experience on both sides of the table.
      - gaius 9y ago
        How do you game a metric which is actually "the performance of the company"? You can't without, umm, making the company perform better, which is the goal, no? It's only - as you asserted - "hard" because people try to wriggle around this truth to capture a bigger slice of the pie for themselves.
        dasil003 9y ago
        Dude, you are willfully ignoring my point. The discussion is about metrics such as bugs fixed, features shipped, and commits pushed. The sentence you are fixated on is entirely beside the point.

gaius 9y ago

It's hard enough to create a culture where everyone is focused on the success of the business without reducing people No it's easy; make everyone an equity partner.

ryandrake 9y ago
It's funny because "aligning employee interests with the company's interests" is probably one of the easiest problems for a business owner to solve, yet it's treated as some holy grail of business knowledge. I once worked with an entrepreneur of a very closely held small business. It was owned exclusively by the entrepreneur and his family, no employee had any share whatsoever, as far as I could tell. He often complained that employees lacked initiative, work ethic, etc. and didn't "treat the business like it was their own". Yep, that's a head scratcher.
- gaius 9y ago
  My last employer, a vast multinational, exhorted everyone to "think like an owner" but that was kinda hard to do when they referred to every employee as a "resource".
dasil003 9y ago
You're hijacking my comment to grandstand on an orthogonal point. Even if everyone has equity, if you put up metrics to measure productivity, they will be gamed, so choose carefully.
- gaius 9y ago
  I'm not hijacking it; I'm refuting it.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    You are not refuting it, you are cherry-picking one phrase of my comment which is not central to the thesis and pushing your own agenda. That bit of my comment can be completely replaced without affecting my comment but giving you no stone against which to grind your axe. Compensation is one thing, feedback on performance is another. Unless you think everything should be a cooperative with equal ownership and that will magically solve all performance problems, in which case go do that, but I will neither found a company like that nor work for one and I have two decades of experience on both sides of the table.
    - gaius 9y ago
      How do you game a metric which is actually "the performance of the company"? You can't without, umm, making the company perform better, which is the goal, no? It's only - as you asserted - "hard" because people try to wriggle around this truth to capture a bigger slice of the pie for themselves.
      - dasil003 9y ago
        Dude, you are willfully ignoring my point. The discussion is about metrics such as bugs fixed, features shipped, and commits pushed. The sentence you are fixated on is entirely beside the point.