6 ms·
Ex-Finance developers mock McKinsey's monitoring metrics
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhat is this article? Why is it citing three seemingly non noteworthy people’s opinions and crediting them with their former roles as a headline takeaway? Are we to take away that they are currently unemployed?
- _8j50 3y agoTheir former roles and industry experience is why they are noteworthy and being quoted. I have no idea why your takeaway is that, if I said "I used to live in san francisco" would your takeaway be that I now live homeless outside of any city? And if the subject was about measuring crime in san francisco, would former SFPD cops being quotes seem abnormal to you?
- jncfhnb 3y agoI do think it would be very strange to write an article with the headline “Ex-Cops mock a new office policy” It’s a very pointless article and it’s strange to focus on a few random people’s opinions on something that does not have obvious importance. Especially when hundreds of thousands of workers who are active. One of these people seem to be a former entry level worker. Why? This is less valid than “some people on Twitter said”
- plasma_beam 3y agoGergely Orosz has a very popular blog/newsletter and has posted on the McKinsey report. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/author/gergely/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/author/gergely/ https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-develop... https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity-part-2 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-develop...
- asplake 3y agoDoing the rounds just about everywhere: “Yes, you can measure software developer productivity” https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/yes-you-can-measure-software-developer-productivity https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
- ebiester 3y agoDave Farley, Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz are hardly non-noteworthy people. Farley is best known as being a significant contributor to Continuous Delivery. Kent Beck was an initial signatory to the agile manifesto. Gergely Orosz has four books to his credit and has a significant following. Farley didn't mock them - he had open contempt. Beck and Orosz wrote a great critique, but had no mocking involved. But calling them ex-fintech is kind of like saying Marjorie Taylor Greene is an ex-CrossFit gym owner. While technically true, it's not the relevant accomplishment in most conversations.
- jncfhnb 3y agoOk! So that makes sense. These are people with some credibility and authority. Why the hell is this not mentioned in the article in favor of their former jobs?!
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoBecause the content of an argument should trump the last title someone held?
- jncfhnb 3y agoThat may apply to logical debate, but it does not apply to persuasive writing nor interesting reporting. Writing about a person and providing background information about their former job but not about the facts that make them pertinent to the subject matter is dumb.
- ebiester 3y agoIt's an article written by someone outside the community with low context, and likely for $20 or something similar. It's a low quality article.
- IKantRead 3y agoI don't think any leadership team has hired McKinsey because they think McKinsey does a world class job at leading software projects. McKinsey is in the business of reputation laundering. They start the process by building up reputation. They hire from prestigious schools, have prestigious customers, make themselves a household name for the people that matter. Then when you need someone to make an unpopular decision for you, or take the blame for a project failure, they swoop in and take you money in exchange for taking the reputation hit. It's fine, they know how to grow more reputation when necessary, and everyone at your org or in the media if the situation calls for it, points to them and says "what a bad/stupid/down right evil decision McKinsey made!" while remain the responsible person who tried their best by hiring what you and your peers thought was the best.
- candiddevmike 3y agoMcKinsey is normalized industrial espionage. You pay them to validate what you're doing against your competitors. They'll tell you if you're ahead or behind. McKinsey is in business because McKinsey is in businesses.
- herewego 3y agoThis and it’s very well known, but don’t discount their talent. There are plenty of smart and effective people at McKinsey, even if they make mistakes like the rest of humanity.
- version_five 3y agoThat would be way better than why they actually are. It's a bunch of pretentious sycophantic kids who target empty "leadership" types with advice that sounds smart if you don't think to hard but has extremely good production values. There's a reason they exist but it has absolutely nothing to do with bringing anything of value other than reputation and knowing their audience. Actually bringing outside info from competitors would be cool but way too tangible for them.
- sinistersnare 3y agoWow, powerful stutff. It really shows that capitalism commodotizes all. Even being spied on is given appropriate value. What an insane system we have.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swader999 3y agoAnytime I manage I refuse to track dev productivity individually. Its all about how much functionality (complexity points) gets net accepted in prod per unit of time from the whole team. If you measure at the team level you get collaboration and much better solutions. It's a friendlier and more rewarding way to work with little turnover. It encourages product, dev and QA to work together and solve user problems in economical ways, not just throw solutions over the fence to the next stage. And yeah sure I know if there's someone not performing up to their pay rate, you don't need numbers for that, you need to be involved and looking at their code.
- justin_oaks 3y ago> looking at their code. I can't imagine many development managers do that. And even if they did, I'm not convinced that many would make a good assessment that way. Most of the managers I've had over my career have been poor coders. I'd hate to have them judging me by their conception of what good code is. EDIT: I guess many people have had better managers than I've had. So my "most" and "many" may be off base.
- the-smug-one 3y agoCounting myself as fortunate that I can git-blame and find my managers' (admittedly often old commit) name in the code base :-).
- swader999 3y agoFair point!
- swader999 3y agoWell do you think someone managing development shouldn't know how to code? How would they hire? I've never worked on teams where dev is larger than six and I've always coded though. Bigger than six is automatically create another team in my books.
- 3y ago
- jph 3y agoA deep dive on developer productivity metrics tends to lead to queueing theory. This is an area some developers know because of DORA and metrics such as MTTR or shorthands such as "do one merge per day". It turns out that knowing some queueing theory can be very helpful when talking about productivity metrics, kanban, ticket servicing, and more. My notes on queueing theory for developers: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/queueing-theory https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/queueing-theory
- akomtu 3y agoAnyone's productivity can be measured, or at least what's left of that productivity after measuring. You may know nothing about how musicians make music, but you can measure superficial traits, such as the number of distinct notes used per minute of music, the feedback score from a committee you hired, the lead time to deliver a musical unit, and so on.
- realo 3y agoJohn Cage might not fit into your simple models, I'm afraid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″
- nitwit005 3y agoThese people want to optimize making money. If you compare technical musical ability against musician income, I suspect you'll find a surprisingly weak relationship.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoSo by that measure, the most productive guitarists are strumming staccato as fast as possible Kinda like how the best programmers type lines of code the fastest
- darth_avocado 3y agoCounter intuitive, but sometimes dev productivity revolves around actively not shipping things or making sure you drive initiatives that are purely a product of “banana measuring contests” to the ground. “Hey let’s ship this AI chat bot I heard about at a conference”. How about we save those hundreds of thousands of dollars that we’ll spend on training a sub par chatbot that will result in frustrated users who will leave with whatever limited revenue we get from them.
- paulcole 3y agoDevelopers snark about MBAs! News at 11!
- brolumir 3y ago> Kent Beck, ex-fellow at payroll infrastructure fintech Gusto ... Really weird way to introduce Kent Beck
- biogene 3y agoIMO, you can take the dev word out, many productivity metrics are of dubious value, because corporate people love applying structures and systems to problems, only due to the fact that it is a structure rather than any inherent benefit. Person A might need a completely different style of management/metrics than Person B, and Person A after a year might need yet another style of management/metrics. Its all messy and ad-hoc, because such are humans. (Not a perfect analogy) If you replace humans with processors, and work with code, its the same efficiency paradox that devs know all too well. You apply an abstraction to solve a design problem, even if you already are aware that the Good™ solution is a hardware specific optimization or a new API design just to solve that one problem. Abstractions are seen as seemingly scalable, give you flexibility and leverage in other ways so they are Better™. Performance focused devs are the complete opposite they give you maximum efficiency, by have a near-perfect match with the code>compiler>hardware. But at the significant cost of increased dev timelines, code complexity, stress, etc. The manager equivalent here would be the same where they are able to match their own style to the specific person they're managing. But these styles are impossible to create a universal system around.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y agoI clicked through to the linked McKinsey article [1] to see what all the hubbub was about, and I found this gem: > For example, one company found that its most talented developers were spending excessive time on noncoding activities such as design sessions or managing interdependencies across teams. In response, the company changed its operating model and clarified roles and responsibilities to enable those highest-value developers to do what they do best: code. The rest of the article is equally hare-brained. It's a sort of clueless management-consultant thinking that believes software engineers should be furiously typing all the time, and it entirely fails to understand that actual software engineering is about solving business problems. Stuff like this really makes me wish I'd optimized for $$$ earlier in my career, and I only hope I can retire before this kind of absurd thinking spreads into real technology companies. [1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/yes-you-can-measure-software-developer-productivity https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel... EDIT: Changed "MBA thinking" to "management-consultant thinking," in response to fair feedback below.
- ryandrake 3y ago> It's a sort of clueless MBA thinking that believes software engineers should be furiously typing all the time (Your point is good, but the dig against MBAs is unnecessary and I wish it was less acceptable here on HN. It wouldn't be ok to make fun of people with Sociology degrees or History degrees here, but jokes about MBAs get a pass. We really should be better than that, but I realize I'm swimming against the current on this one.) That aside, I have found a lot of clueless folks in tech leadership have that "furiously typing" misconception, as if developers are only productive when their fingertips are pounding keys. I once worked with a CEO who refused to set aside time in the schedule for things like setting up source control and a bug tracker, because he believed that developers should be furiously typing code in at all times.
- eynsham 3y agoHistory and sociology are respectable academic disciplines.
- siva7 3y agoI wonder how they retain senior talent with such bs? Pay must be exceptional i guess.
- r00tanon 3y agoWow. I see almost nothing controversial in the McKinsey article. In a nutshell it addresses hard metrics (DORA) gathered via the repo tooling (commits, MRs, etc) which is enhanced with some outcome metrics, and they combine with soft metrics (SPACE) which are inevitably fluffy on the numbers combined with some other measurements to fill out arguable gaps. But overall, it didn't read like a manifesto. As far as the criticism from the "ex-finance developers" - yeah, some of whom have done a lot of other noteworthy things outside of "fintech". I don't think it was overly harsh. In fact, maybe just focusing in on certain things that inevitably leave a bad taste - such as assigning numbers to human being's activities or otherwise trying to distill human activity down to hard numbers can lead to abuse - no kidding - almost a tautological argument. That said, happy people with a shared vision and supportive management delivering a product/idea that is contributing to the team's concept of "the greater good" will always be the sweet spot for productivity. I would lean more towards the SPACE metrics as the best way to measure, but allow that hard metrics such as DORA can be helpful as alarm bells.
- pipes 3y ago"set a goal to merge a pull request every day." This is just another version of making sure your developers are typing. The most valuable feature I've seen implemented in a real commercial product took months to research and design. Merging a pull request everyday would have been a time consuming distraction.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI've been at companies that hired McKinsey to tell them what to do. In each case it was a spectacular failure. But also in each case, the executives and leadership who chose to hire and listen to McKinsey went onward and upward in their careers after those spectacular failures. As others are saying here, they really aren't in the advice business. They're in the scapegoat business.
- hnpxr 3y ago[dead]