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People who truly think this is any useful kind of metric are probably the ones who think # lines of code written = productive work. Or, as Bill Gates put it so
by posedge 6y ago
People who truly think this is any useful kind of metric are probably the ones who think # lines of code written = productive work. Or, as Bill Gates put it so nicely, they are measuring the progress on the aircraft by its weight.
- koheripbal 6y agoThere's nothing as effective as a good manager. A good manager can often sense when someone is not doing their job, or has disconnected. In one case, a good manager came to me and asked me to check the "bossware" software to see if a certain employee was working while "working from home". ...turns out they were not. So we terminated them. Good manager + bossware = Efficient process.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoHe could have been sleeping days and working nights etc. Surely you look at their actual ouput and judge from that, unless I'm missing something.
- scoot_718 6y agoYeah, that's good management, only detect after the problem has gotten too big, and then deal with it in the most useless way possible. Go team.
- rbrtl 6y agoHow was the manager a good manager here? They didn't "sense" anything, they just asked you to show them some stats on a dashboard. They didn't approach the person for an explanation or conversation. This manager totally removed the human from the person struggling with their job. That makes them a good robot.
- kuzimoto 6y agoJust to give them the benefit of the doubt, we don't know if this is the first or tenth time this employee was slacking off, or what action (if any) had already taken place to improve things. I can additionally imagine that koheripbal was not privy to any information regarding that employee's performance besides that one thing.
- neves 6y agoExcellent way to treat people with personal problems like depression, health problems or a failing marriage. This is really an efficient society that I don't to live on.
- peacemaker 6y agoCounting lines of code is definitely not a useful metric, however, you can extract a lot of information via the Github API that I believe can help with managing a tech team. It's exactly why I created getdevinsight.com as I think too many managers rely on bad metrics like lines of code and we can do better.
- norswap 6y agoPerhaps one should look at the work being done instead of "relying on metrics"? Just a suggestion...
- peacemaker 6y agoEasier said than done when you've a large, busy team to manage alongside lots of other work. Besides, if you're a non-technical leader it can be difficult to understand how things are going unless you have some kind of metrics to track.
- posedge 6y ago"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodheart's law. Give people a metric - any metric - and they will (conciously or otherwise) start optimizing that instead of the actual goal.
- m463 6y agoReminds me of this store: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...