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Some types of high productivity are easily visible, some aren't. The dev who can whip out tons of stable code is easily measured. The dev who fights to stop an

Some types of high productivity are easily visible, some aren't. The dev who can whip out tons of stable code is easily measured. The dev who fights to stop an unneeded re-architecure or veto feature requests that would have maintenance overhead unjustified by their value is harder to judge. And yet that veto may be the equivalent of 2-3 FTEs savings.

Afton 5y ago
Haha, when I had been a software dev for a year, I interviewed at MS and they asked what my biggest success was. I said it was convincing an architect and 3 FTEs that they didn't need to spend 2 months on a 100% solution, given that we had all the pieces of an 90% solution ready at hand. They did not seem impressed. I did get hired though... More seriously, I've met several people who really struggled to get recognized officially for their work. One was someone who was just amazing at cross team collaboration. Specifically, we were a small group, doing an important strategic project, but we needed some work from other teams that were serving the companies larger, single product. It was hard to get them to free up a couple of dev-days, even when we had the explicit support up and down the management chain. She was amazing at getting the ICs on the team to get on board. But really struggled during review cycles because a fair amount of her work wasn't traditional lines-of-code/jiras. Another example was a developer who was a king at driving customer solutions through the dev team. He was a developer, and even though he's probably responsible for millions in not-lost-sales, he struggled to get the recognition he deserved. Anyway, just agreeing with some examples from my professional life.