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The problem with all of these metrics is that they assume that there's an engineering team, or someone on an engineering team, somewhere that's not doing shit.
by kodah 4y ago
The problem with all of these metrics is that they assume that there's an engineering team, or someone on an engineering team, somewhere that's not doing shit. Whether the business believes they're not doing shit because they refactor more than they write features, because they release twice a year instead of every week, or because they have less frequent merges. The entire emphasis of measurement is squarely a technical one which comes from the (management) belief that some engineer somewhere isn't contributing and that's bringing the team down. I've rarely encountered these kinds of engineers, much less teams, and designing an incredibly painful system that senselessly costs people their jobs and livelihood all in the hapless pursuit of identifying them seems fraught.
Where these metrics would be useful is if the business actually looked at itself first when teams or team members underperform. In all honesty, I've never met a manager with this kind of mindset; they're usually captured by the belief of the above in some way.
Businesses do have an old way of determining whether a team is meeting its goals: KPIs. If the team is responsible for a succinct domain, problem, or stack then these KPIs are easy to draw and measure against because they reflect business outcomes rather than trying to normalize for how everyone on a team contributes.
- prepend 4y agoI’ve worked with teams and individuals that do nothing. Like literally nothing, they do shit. I once had to wrap up a product release for contract close out or something and it involved getting all the code and commits from developers who were rolling off. It amazed me how many had zero code they had written in months. I had one developer that had never committed anything in the three months he was there. Obviously this is a management problem and it’s not a single individuals fault. But the manager had like 90 contractors reporting to them and didn’t care that people had zero lines of code written. The developer’s job was to code. I wanted to mention that as there are developers and designers who don’t code but are productive in other ways.
- kodah 4y agoI believe you, I'm sure they exist, my argument is that they're not common enough for this level of pain. Personally, the way that org is sounds like it was by design.
- hinkley 4y agoI have had devs who did next to nothing, I've also had devs who had their repository settings wrong such that all their commits were either ascribed to no-one, the dev who helped onboard them (or wrote the docs) or a team lead. Having some metrics here can help sort this out before you call some senior dev at 12:30 in the morning for code they didn't even write.