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My company uses scrum to try to track engineering output. My boss looks at metrics like line counts. It is extremely stressful to be on a team of people who are
by novia 3y ago
My company uses scrum to try to track engineering output. My boss looks at metrics like line counts. It is extremely stressful to be on a team of people who are all worried about losing their jobs and will accidentally (?) commit your changes to their MR. It's extremely stressful to spend all day doing research tracking down a weird issue in prod, deploying a hotfix finally, and realizing that all of that effort, which did not go towards anything you were supposed to be working on that sprint, but was nonetheless necessary, resulted in a one line change. 8 hours of your life, feeling highly stressed, maybe skipping lunch, results in fixing one typo somewhere. You think about how you'll get a bad performance review despite working hard.
I wish I was on a team of engineers who just did their work and didn't worry about gaming the system. I wish the engineers I worked with had enough time to be careful that such small mistakes, which are difficult to track down after the fact, did not make it to prod to cause our customers grief. I wish that management was competent enough to know that adding a missing quotation mark to the repo isn't just adding a missing quotation mark to the repo.
- boxed 3y agoI assume you are actively searching for a new job? I hope that place has exit interviews later so you can freely tell them on the way out how bad this is. But considering how bad it is, it would surprise me.
- novia 3y agoToday is actually my last day. If any sane companies have openings, please hit me up.
- noughtnaut 3y ago> metrics like line counts Send your boss a link to "Negative 2000 Lines of Code"[1] and ask him if he thinks Bill was a shitty coder. When I was scrum master for two teams I, too, tracked some metrics (for feedback and improvement, not for pay or career (ab)use). While I did track the number of story points delivered and user stories closed per sprint, one of the things I was more interested in was how accurately the teams managed to hit their estimates (regardless of what they were). In that perspective, delivering too much too quickly was just as undesired as the opposite. We used this to refine the way that we did estimates, story refinement, and sprint planning. Naturally these were team-based metrics, because software development is a team activity. [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- novia 3y ago> Naturally these were team-based metrics, because software development is a team activity. Applying those same metrics to individuals is too tempting for a subpar manager. The data is right there!