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> be an engineer yourself before attempting to manage some I honestly think this is a luxury for a lot of companies that are trying to transform themselves int

by sdesol 6y ago

> be an engineer yourself before attempting to manage some I honestly think this is a luxury for a lot of companies that are trying to transform themselves into a tech company. When I took time off from my first failed startup attempt, I ended up working for a fintech and it was obvious that a lot of the "tech managers" were not technical people themselves. The challenge for this fintech, which had close to 1 trillion dollars in assets, is they couldn't really attract engineering managers and they had to make do with the people they had. This is why "engineering metrics" is currently gaining a lot of steam. A lot of managers and organizations are suddenly finding themselves having to manage techies and they are desperately looking for ways to compensate for the fact that they aren't tech people themselves. This is why when companies see solutions like GitPrime, GitHub Insights, and other similar solutions, they get very excited because they feel they found that magical translator that can help them better manage tech employees.

908B64B197 6y ago
> they couldn't really attract engineering managers and they had to make do with the people they had. How comes? > A lot of managers and organizations are suddenly finding themselves having to manage techies and they are desperately looking for ways to compensate for the fact that they aren't tech people themselves. There are now MBAs that are tailored specially for that [0]. If people think they can just eyeball it with "Engineering metrics", they should read this [1]. [0] https://cs.stanford.edu/academics/joint-degree-programs/joint-cs-msmba-degree https://cs.stanford.edu/academics/joint-degree-programs/join... [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- sdesol 6y ago
  > How comes? Politics, workers rights and so forth. You really can't just fire hundreds and potentially thousands of employees without cause. A lot of companies will have to provide a career path for many of these managers. > If people think they can just eyeball it with "Engineering metrics", they should read this I think we both know this, along with many people here at HN, but HN doesn't reflect what I've personally seen. I'm trying to advocate for "Developer First Software Metrics", which is what my tool is focused on, but I've had far too many conversations with potential customers that wants to sum up a developers worth with a simple chart. In the business world, we don't assume business intelligence will come easy, which is why we hire business intelligence specialist. However for engineering metrics, this attitude isn't quite there yet and many and I mean many companies with non-traditional tech backgrounds want to believe they can easily quantify a developers worth with superficial metrics. Because in a lot of ways, they see developers like factory workers, where their unit of work can be easily quantified.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  MBAs make companies less competitive. When American companies were led by engineers, American companies were #1. Now, thanks to MBAs and decades of emphasizing short-term vision, every major American company is being eaten alive by the international competitors they helped create.
29athrowaway 6y ago
> This is why when companies see solutions like GitPrime, GitHub Insights, and other similar solutions, they get very excited because they feel they found that magical translator that can help them better manage tech employees. If you promote people based on metrics from GitHub Insights you will end up with an awful organization. Employees are not stupid, they can manipulate any metric you use to measure their performance. For example, if you promote the engineers that get the most commits, then people will conspire to delay code reviews so that only their friends get their commits merged in a timely manner. Or they will break their deliverables into an absurd amount of commits so that they get credited with the most commits. > I honestly think this is a luxury for a lot of companies No, it's not. The real luxury is hiring entire teams of capable people and then ask someone that has no clue about what's going on to tell them what to do. Not only it's a waste of time for every engineer, it's a waste of time for the engineers families and the education system that made their formation possible. Learning about differential and integral calculus, differential equations, mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, discrete mathematics, theory of computation, compilers, databases, programming languages, data structures and algorithms, cryptography, information security, operating systems, networking, how to make a computer from scratch from logic gates, etc... only so that in the end you have to talk to a completely clueless guy that has no qualifications whatsoever but has "managerial soft skills" (psychopathic traits).

by sdesol 6y ago

908B64B197 6y ago

> they couldn't really attract engineering managers and they had to make do with the people they had. How comes? > A lot of managers and organizations are suddenly finding themselves having to manage techies and they are desperately looking for ways to compensate for the fact that they aren't tech people themselves. There are now MBAs that are tailored specially for that [0]. If people think they can just eyeball it with "Engineering metrics", they should read this [1]. [0] https://cs.stanford.edu/academics/joint-degree-programs/joint-cs-msmba-degree https://cs.stanford.edu/academics/joint-degree-programs/join... [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

sdesol 6y ago
> How comes? Politics, workers rights and so forth. You really can't just fire hundreds and potentially thousands of employees without cause. A lot of companies will have to provide a career path for many of these managers. > If people think they can just eyeball it with "Engineering metrics", they should read this I think we both know this, along with many people here at HN, but HN doesn't reflect what I've personally seen. I'm trying to advocate for "Developer First Software Metrics", which is what my tool is focused on, but I've had far too many conversations with potential customers that wants to sum up a developers worth with a simple chart. In the business world, we don't assume business intelligence will come easy, which is why we hire business intelligence specialist. However for engineering metrics, this attitude isn't quite there yet and many and I mean many companies with non-traditional tech backgrounds want to believe they can easily quantify a developers worth with superficial metrics. Because in a lot of ways, they see developers like factory workers, where their unit of work can be easily quantified.
29athrowaway 6y ago
MBAs make companies less competitive. When American companies were led by engineers, American companies were #1. Now, thanks to MBAs and decades of emphasizing short-term vision, every major American company is being eaten alive by the international competitors they helped create.

29athrowaway 6y ago

> This is why when companies see solutions like GitPrime, GitHub Insights, and other similar solutions, they get very excited because they feel they found that magical translator that can help them better manage tech employees. If you promote people based on metrics from GitHub Insights you will end up with an awful organization. Employees are not stupid, they can manipulate any metric you use to measure their performance. For example, if you promote the engineers that get the most commits, then people will conspire to delay code reviews so that only their friends get their commits merged in a timely manner. Or they will break their deliverables into an absurd amount of commits so that they get credited with the most commits. > I honestly think this is a luxury for a lot of companies No, it's not. The real luxury is hiring entire teams of capable people and then ask someone that has no clue about what's going on to tell them what to do. Not only it's a waste of time for every engineer, it's a waste of time for the engineers families and the education system that made their formation possible. Learning about differential and integral calculus, differential equations, mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, discrete mathematics, theory of computation, compilers, databases, programming languages, data structures and algorithms, cryptography, information security, operating systems, networking, how to make a computer from scratch from logic gates, etc... only so that in the end you have to talk to a completely clueless guy that has no qualifications whatsoever but has "managerial soft skills" (psychopathic traits).