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Task completion should be the metric, not line counts, otherwise the incentive is creating the most bloated piece of software and the most comprehensive unit-te
by touristtam 6y ago
Task completion should be the metric, not line counts, otherwise the incentive is creating the most bloated piece of software and the most comprehensive unit-test possible. Any system is going to be (ab)used by the employee to their benefit.
- cma 6y agoTask completion as a metric incentivizes hacky approaches that cause issues down the line. You can counteract some with strict code review standards, but a bad job requires a longer review, and then the reviewers start falling behind in their task completion metric.
- qayxc 6y agoRelevant post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762526 Task completion would also be abused, because it's too vague. It simply shifts the burden to the one formulating the task (e.g. preventing holes in the specification like missing performance or hardware requirements). Exaggerated example: if the "task" is to automatically deliver a report containing certain data and formatted in a specified way, the easy way might be an implementation that stalls the DB server for hours with deeply nested FULL OUTER JOINs on non-index fields. The task would be completed quickly and arguably correctly, since neither runtime nor memory requirements were explicitly specified... But you said it yourself, any system is going to be abused...
- geoffbp 6y agoIt's even harder then you toss support tickets into the mix, and if the team has other non project work.