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> Developer productivity can be compared to a sales funnel, with key metrics that can be tracked at each stage I dont like the idea of ruthless efficiency by t

> Developer productivity can be compared to a sales funnel, with key metrics that can be tracked at each stage I dont like the idea of ruthless efficiency by tracking metrics similar to a sales funnel. It gives me the mental image of everyone competing and inflating numbers or gaming the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

xmorg 4y ago
Working with the iconiq capacity allocation framework was just awful. It was really frustrating because more time was spent about how work should be coded than the work itself. Quality didn't end up mattering because there was no accountability for actually delivering good software because following iconiq's standards was considered good enough. It was weird because management would routinely be surprised that our metrics were good but reality was not. As a grunt, it was frustrating because there was no room for productivity improvements because those were to only come from the top.
Silhouette 4y ago
Managers have become obsessed with being "agile" and "data driven" and yet never seem to notice how much useful engineering time and attention is being lost to all of those finely detailed breakdowns and regular meetings and tracking and monitoring processes. A common failure mode now seems to be that managers focus on metrics that don't really represent any useful reality to begin with but persist in trying to optimise those metrics even when their engineering team is telling them plainly that they're looking at garbage in and garbage out. The one metric no-one in management ever seems to consider is how much all of the management overheads themselves cost.
- andyjsong 4y ago
  There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC. We can estimate when the PR will be pushed to prod or the contract gets signed. Generally, the more experience you have, the better you’re at setting expectations on when a PR/opp will close. The PR or opp can stall, but it’s up to the person responsible for the PR or opp to notify the rest of the team that there will be a delay or figure out a way to unblock. The big difference is the lack of accountability. AFAIK if a developer misses shipping during a sprint, they’ll just add it to the next sprint. If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. I think this is because sales have very clear metrics that everyone can agree upon: revenue, number of demos, cold outreach, etc. We’ve been tracking these types of metrics in cuneiform. Comp sci wasn’t a thing until the 1960s. It’s still too new and everyone has an opinion on what metrics to focus on without angering a developer for micromanaging them. This is where the friction lies; until that’s fixed, you will not have a cohesive team. I hope that AI takes over and we don’t need devs or salespeople anymore. context: I’m a sales guy that sold software that tracks “engineering performance” to VPs of Eng and CTOs depending on the size of your company. It was shocking to see the level of variance in measuring performance metrics for eng teams.
  - jordanbeiber 4y ago
    I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.
    - kqr 4y ago
      To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
      - jordanbeiber 4y ago
        Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
        andyjsong 4y ago
        you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.
- mrcartmeneses 4y ago
  This is in some ways deliberate from management. They’re often not really needed and are making busy work for themselves at the expense of the company’s goals
- valenterry 4y ago
  Right. First question should be: what does your data say about how much it cost to have an agile / data driven process compared to not having one? :)
nordsieck 4y ago
> I dont like the idea of ruthless efficiency by tracking metrics similar to a sales funnel. It's probably quite helpful if you do it yourself. But yeah - definitely something that has historically been easy to game.
osigurdson 4y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold. The problem with most measurable measures in software is they are gameable proxy-non-grata. The whole thing depends on being able to compute the net present value of a patch on a given code base. Then pay the developer/team some percentage of this. What a beautiful reality that would be for developers and businesses alike. To bad there is no conceivable way to do it. I'd guess computing this is 1E12X harder than protein folding.
- goodlinks 4y ago
  "Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold." IMHO this is a bad measure, its how you end up poluting oand poisoning etc. fro profit no?
  - _hl_ 4y ago
    That's because these are also just proxy metrics for "net value provided to society", and heavily distorted at that.
  - devinrhode2 4y ago
    I'd say highlighting environmental issues doesn't make it a bad metric It highlights missing rules/regulations
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Gosh, what a tangential poke - gold bad because cyanide, argument invalid because said gold. Fine, exclude gold from the argument and just use cash / e-transfer.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  > Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold. Unfortunately, this often leads to corporate shortsightedness (e.g. "This will destroy our customer goodwill and eliminate our competitiveness in the coming decade, but it will make our quarterly revenue targets and our jobs depend on that, so we're doing it.")
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

xmorg 4y ago

Working with the iconiq capacity allocation framework was just awful. It was really frustrating because more time was spent about how work should be coded than the work itself. Quality didn't end up mattering because there was no accountability for actually delivering good software because following iconiq's standards was considered good enough. It was weird because management would routinely be surprised that our metrics were good but reality was not. As a grunt, it was frustrating because there was no room for productivity improvements because those were to only come from the top.

Silhouette 4y ago

Managers have become obsessed with being "agile" and "data driven" and yet never seem to notice how much useful engineering time and attention is being lost to all of those finely detailed breakdowns and regular meetings and tracking and monitoring processes. A common failure mode now seems to be that managers focus on metrics that don't really represent any useful reality to begin with but persist in trying to optimise those metrics even when their engineering team is telling them plainly that they're looking at garbage in and garbage out. The one metric no-one in management ever seems to consider is how much all of the management overheads themselves cost.

andyjsong 4y ago
There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC. We can estimate when the PR will be pushed to prod or the contract gets signed. Generally, the more experience you have, the better you’re at setting expectations on when a PR/opp will close. The PR or opp can stall, but it’s up to the person responsible for the PR or opp to notify the rest of the team that there will be a delay or figure out a way to unblock. The big difference is the lack of accountability. AFAIK if a developer misses shipping during a sprint, they’ll just add it to the next sprint. If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. I think this is because sales have very clear metrics that everyone can agree upon: revenue, number of demos, cold outreach, etc. We’ve been tracking these types of metrics in cuneiform. Comp sci wasn’t a thing until the 1960s. It’s still too new and everyone has an opinion on what metrics to focus on without angering a developer for micromanaging them. This is where the friction lies; until that’s fixed, you will not have a cohesive team. I hope that AI takes over and we don’t need devs or salespeople anymore. context: I’m a sales guy that sold software that tracks “engineering performance” to VPs of Eng and CTOs depending on the size of your company. It was shocking to see the level of variance in measuring performance metrics for eng teams.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.
  - kqr 4y ago
    To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
    - jordanbeiber 4y ago
      Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
      - andyjsong 4y ago
        you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
This is in some ways deliberate from management. They’re often not really needed and are making busy work for themselves at the expense of the company’s goals
valenterry 4y ago
Right. First question should be: what does your data say about how much it cost to have an agile / data driven process compared to not having one? :)

nordsieck 4y ago

> I dont like the idea of ruthless efficiency by tracking metrics similar to a sales funnel. It's probably quite helpful if you do it yourself. But yeah - definitely something that has historically been easy to game.

osigurdson 4y ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold. The problem with most measurable measures in software is they are gameable proxy-non-grata. The whole thing depends on being able to compute the net present value of a patch on a given code base. Then pay the developer/team some percentage of this. What a beautiful reality that would be for developers and businesses alike. To bad there is no conceivable way to do it. I'd guess computing this is 1E12X harder than protein folding.

goodlinks 4y ago
"Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold." IMHO this is a bad measure, its how you end up poluting oand poisoning etc. fro profit no?
- _hl_ 4y ago
  That's because these are also just proxy metrics for "net value provided to society", and heavily distorted at that.
- devinrhode2 4y ago
  I'd say highlighting environmental issues doesn't make it a bad metric It highlights missing rules/regulations
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Gosh, what a tangential poke - gold bad because cyanide, argument invalid because said gold. Fine, exclude gold from the argument and just use cash / e-transfer.
kstenerud 4y ago
> Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold. Unfortunately, this often leads to corporate shortsightedness (e.g. "This will destroy our customer goodwill and eliminate our competitiveness in the coming decade, but it will make our quarterly revenue targets and our jobs depend on that, so we're doing it.")

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]