4 ms·

Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't ac

Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand the process of actually making software is infuriating. And even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on the chopping block.

joshstrange 4y ago
Exactly. At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action". I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in. A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.
sbf501 4y ago
Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That couldn't be more wrong.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high performing individuals, but usually that just entails keeping upper management out of the way. As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into place just to provide cover for firing people. So they can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify the firing.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    > Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves, I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the hard way.
- jfim 4y ago
  This really depends on the definition of success. If success is just execution without needing to be too novel, metrics work. Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.

joshstrange 4y ago

Exactly. At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action". I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in. A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.

sbf501 4y ago

Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That couldn't be more wrong.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high performing individuals, but usually that just entails keeping upper management out of the way. As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into place just to provide cover for firing people. So they can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify the firing.
- sbf501 4y ago
  > Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves, I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the hard way.
jfim 4y ago
This really depends on the definition of success. If success is just execution without needing to be too novel, metrics work. Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.