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I disagree so strongly with this. There's a pervasive fallacy in the industry that things that aren't quantifiable, or are hard to quantify, can't be real or tr
by ajkjk 5y ago
I disagree so strongly with this. There's a pervasive fallacy in the industry that things that aren't quantifiable, or are hard to quantify, can't be real or true. It's just wrong: they can be very true, and often such things are deeply true but whole organizations are ignoring them because they haven't found a convenient way to shoehorn them into their KPIs / OKR framework / whatever.
Yes, it is often the case that product managers have no concern about the code quality. No, the problem is not that N days aren't given for QA. If the product managers talk to the engineers, they will get a sense of the problem. If they work as colleagues they will be in this sort of discussion all the time. When a product is implemented, they'll keep talking, and they'll be aware that the major corners are being cut, and they'll understand that that puts it at risk. Then they can make better decisions to avoid this.
If they have that information and still make the wrong decisions, then they have perverse incentivizes or are behaving maliciously to the business.
And if they try to reduce the intuition and professional opinions of their engineering team to some numbers -- estimates, QA lead times, bug counts -- which are pitched over the wall, badly summarizing actual expertise -- then they will fail, badly, over time, because that is a nonsensical way to work.
Good decision-making and leadership, imo, don't need you to have found ways to quantify things, and your time is often better spent doing good work than waiting for things to be put into numbers. Quantification helps, sometimes.
"If it isn't measurable, how can you make the needed changes? " Doesn't that question sound absurd? You make the needed changes! What does measurability have to do with it?
- lkrubner 5y agoI strongly agree. I wrote something similar here: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/a-master-craftsman-will-have-intuitions?justPublished=true https://demodexio.substack.com/p/a-master-craftsman-will-hav...
- freetinker 5y agoStrongly agree. Another issue with the measurement cult: Goodhart's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- IanCal 5y agoI'll take the opposite view here, mostly because I think it's an interesting issue and don't know where I fall on it. If you can't measure the difference, how do you know you've helped? Or if you've made it worse? > "If it isn't measurable, how can you make the needed changes? " Doesn't that question sound absurd? No, because you're saying something is needed with no observable difference when it's changed. If you can't in any way measure the difference between action and inaction, isn't that equivalent to saying "my action is indistinguishable from inaction"? If someone said "I've fixed the bug, no tests changed and you won't see a difference in the reported issues but it's fixed" how confident would you be that they've actually fixed it? How do you trust their changes are needed?
- ajkjk 5y agoThere's a big difference between something being discernable and something being measurable. For instance -- suppose you join a company and you can tell the culture is messed up from day 1. You go to the CEO and tell them as much. Should they ask: "can you prove it? where's the data?" or should they say: "tell me more, help me understand." .. Obviously the latter. If you can perceive it, it's a valid belief. Obviously it is _somewhat_ subjective, but even subjective things can be true, and from someone with good judgment, they usually are. You probably don't need to go run a survey or something to prove it -- just make a convincing case, in words. Every case is like this one. You can make changes and see that you've had an impact without ever getting distracted by finding a way to put it into numbers, quantification, and measurement.
- IanCal 5y agoSo you make a change to the culture - did it help? What does help mean here? Happier staff, better retention? > You can make changes and see that you've had an impact Well the obvious counter here is how do you see you've had an impact when the impact is so hard to measure? > You probably don't need to go run a survey or something to prove it -- just make a convincing case, in words. And yet I've seen the huge issue of wordsmiths with nothing to back it up with taking over and ruining teams.