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The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unpr
by n4r9 3y ago
The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely.
Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO.
Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?
- oblio 3y agoThey don't. They basically go by highest salaries and various arbitrary measures such as unprofitable division, virtual location, etc.
- paxys 3y agoIt's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.
- jmerz 3y agoThe intersection between politically/socially unpopular and low impact.
- NotSuspicious 3y agoin my experience is greater than the intersection between the politically/socially popular and low impact.
- bcrosby95 3y agoAnecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.
- paxys 3y agoAnd yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?
- izacus 3y agoWhat do you mean "no operational impact"? How did you measure that? People on this site are constantly complaining how horrible the Google services became.
- JAlexoid 3y agoOver the last 3+X years, not suddenly after 1-2 years of layoffs. I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.
- izacus 3y agoLayoffs were 6 months ago.
- paxys 3y agoGoogle services became worse in periods when they doubled headcount year over year than when they did layoffs.
- n4r9 3y agoThis feels like an appeal to intuition. I have no doubt that senior management believes they can do this accurately, but I'm not sure why I ought to agree.
- JohnFen 3y ago> every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. Can they? In my experience, they don't tend to do this when it comes to deciding who to lay off. I assumed this was because they can't tell who the bottom 10-15% are. Team members can tell, but can upper management?
- otteromkram 3y agoDevelopers usually follow scrum frameworks, so productivity could easily be measured by overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.
- danjac 3y agoThat's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced.
- KronisLV 3y ago> That's about as silly a measure as number of lines of code produced. How else would you measure how much work someone does, other than by how much tracked work that's attributed to them there is? The people using these indicators probably don't care about someone who might have fewer closed issues but instead is helping out 5 people work more efficiently, but rather about people who are constantly shipping measurably less than others, stack ranking and all - in their minds, development should be viewed as some widget factory. Just look at what happened to agile and how SAFE ended up: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale That's also how you get attempts to turn some abstract complexity evaluation (story points) into hours that could be billed to a client ahead of time, even though it probably shouldn't and doesn't work like that.
- mulmen 3y agoMeasuring productivity is a fool’s errand. The reality is that performance is subjective and in a hierarchy only the whims of those above you matter.
- robertlagrant 3y agoEase of measurement is not enough. I can drive badly under the speed limit, so even though speed is easy to measure, it's not nearly good enough to evaluate my driving.
- JAlexoid 3y agoThat's literally the last thing that managers look at, when it comes to making a layoff decision. Never have I ever been the person with highest "overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.", yet I have not been laid off in a very long time. Last time I thought I was getting laid off, I misread the manager's comments as PIP.
- woobar 3y ago> how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? The senior management delegates. At every moment your direct manager knows whom they are willing to part ways with if asked. Even if everyone on the team is great there is always some criteria (costs, impact on important project, institutional knowledge) that sets some people apart.
- JAlexoid 3y agoSorry, but mass layoffs aren't exactly the most rational ones. There's a lot of "you have to cut X off your salary budget", pick whoever you want. Then it's up to the managers to pick, very subjectively, who they want to work with the most. FFS - I managed to dodge 4 layoffs at a startup, including my whole department being cut wholesale. My managers always kept me, even though I wouldn't call myself the "best" or "the cheapest". All of it just boils down to one thing - I'm the one that whoever manages me can rely on. Just that... being reliable.
- n4r9 3y agoThat makes sense. In lieu of a reliable objective measure of an employee's impact, the next best thing is to trust the managers judgement. I would still question how effective this is at selecting the "unproductive" workers; I guess it really depends on how good the managers are.