10 ms·

Which American companies do this?

by Fripplebubby 3y ago

spacecadet 3y ago
More than you want to know. As OP pointed out it seems to be a relatively new fad that has me deep sighing...
- cdogl 3y ago
  It is not a new fad; programmers have complained about this management practice since at least the 1970s.
  - dartos 3y ago
    It’s an old fad become new again.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    1995: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug_free_programs_a_dilbert_classic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug... 19th century: the cobra effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
  - Someone 3y ago
    Evidence from 1982: “-2000 Lines Of Code” (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)
legolas2412 3y ago
Google does this.
- bigbee 3y ago
  Not really. It tries to measure "impact" and while direct measures like number of CLs can potentially go into that, this is definitely not the rule. Then again, Google is best thought of as a collection of semi-independent companies loosely bound by culture. Individual managers have a lot of leeway in how they operate, and VPs and Directors have tons of control on how they run their organization, including measuring performance. There are good teams and there are not so good ones.
booleandilemma 3y ago
I've seen this too, unfortunately. Commits, PRs, # of stories. You get silliness from supposed "engineers" who will inflate the points for stories they work on and downplay points for stories others work on. It's pathetic.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  If your employment and career path are tied to some ridiculous metric, and you (and everyone else) have to game it, that seems more like a systemic failure. It is pathetic that the company has set things up like that. Can’t blame the person for playing the dumb game if it puts food on the table.
  - czechdeveloper 3y ago
    It's not like engineers struggle, so playing such games against your colleagues is totally moral failure.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Of course I can.
- uncertainrhymes 3y ago
  I strongly believe you will get exactly the behavior you incentivize for. I used to apply this mostly to sales people -- if their bonus depends on new business, you will get a large number of soon-to-be-unhappy customers. It works more generally though ... if management sets a metric, people will try to game it. On the flip side, you can't just have abstract 'quality' or 'customer satisfaction' because it is hard to know if you are really improving. I've never seen this solved once your scale gets past the small-group-of-people-with-a-shared-dream.
  - badpun 3y ago
    Why do people just roll over and accept such bullshit? When have workers become such pussies? A century ago, people risked their lives (and some died) striking to improve working conditions. Today, people just accept management's asinine policies. Perhaps people are so checked out that they don't care if the policies make any sense at all, as long as they get their paychecks on time.
malermeister 3y ago
Facebook, for one. Source: I've sat in on meetings where engineers were ranked, with # of commits being a key metric. That experience taught me the importance of making lots of small commits, more than any readability concerns ever could :)
- Loughla 3y ago
  I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field?
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field? You answered your own question. Management doesn't want to view engineering as a "creative field". In their ideal world, they want it to work like an assembly line. And for decades they've attempted to quantify it like an assembly line. But as of 2023, management has never been more wrong. A good question is, "Why does management even desire quantification?" The answer to this is rather simple and unbelievable to most engineers toiling so hard. The answer is - management (of all levels) is lazy and unskilled. They want to demonstrate to their bosses that they are running an efficient ship. They quantify it with # of commits or other such proxies. This gets them their own promotions. They don't care if the company survives or if their reports are working on the right things or if engineering challenges differ from one project to another. The most important thing for all managers is - their own promotion.
  - pjbeam 3y ago
    It isn't, at all. It's laziness on the part of management.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    In general it is considered good to make lots of small commits, a commit is a bundle of changes you send to the shared project, you want to keep them small so they are easy to integrate and debug (if necessary). But just counting them is a dumb way to judge productivity, and every programmer hates it. The way to become a manager at a tech company is to be good at programming for a long time, an extremely specialized skill set that has nothing to do with management.
hx8 3y ago
Just look for the ones hiring MBAs.
IKantRead 3y ago
I would say most startups are guilty of this, though they don't attempt to formalize the measurements. At least from a few places I've been recently, "productivity" is viewed as the number of PRs you push through. QA of any sort is viewed as a waste of time, and it's far better to just push a PR today then take an extra day sanity check your work. On top of this user facing, demo-able, code is much more important than any back-end or infra work. This means the priority is rapidly releasing 90% of the way done products/features and moving on to the next thing. Heck if there's a small bug in the code you just shipped (and of course releases are nightly because that's how you show that you're really moving) all the better since it means you get another easy PR when someone else discovers it.
- badpun 3y ago
  That makes sense, given how startups (at least those VC funded) are defacto quasi-scams with a goal of creating an illusion of an unicorn, and then quickly flipping it in an IPO, and happily running away with the money. For such purpose, creating functionality that looks as if it works, but in reality is incomplete and buggy, may be just as good as the real thing. It's all about maintaing the charade until the key people can exit rich (preferably as quickly as possible).
  - IKantRead 3y ago
    This does align pretty well with my experience. Especially when I've seen multiple ideas that are clearly valuable to customers but not flashy enough for VCs get quickly deprioritized.

Which American companies do this?

spacecadet 3y ago

More than you want to know. As OP pointed out it seems to be a relatively new fad that has me deep sighing...

cdogl 3y ago
It is not a new fad; programmers have complained about this management practice since at least the 1970s.
- dartos 3y ago
  It’s an old fad become new again.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  1995: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug_free_programs_a_dilbert_classic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug... 19th century: the cobra effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- Someone 3y ago
  Evidence from 1982: “-2000 Lines Of Code” (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)

legolas2412 3y ago

Google does this.

bigbee 3y ago
Not really. It tries to measure "impact" and while direct measures like number of CLs can potentially go into that, this is definitely not the rule. Then again, Google is best thought of as a collection of semi-independent companies loosely bound by culture. Individual managers have a lot of leeway in how they operate, and VPs and Directors have tons of control on how they run their organization, including measuring performance. There are good teams and there are not so good ones.

booleandilemma 3y ago

I've seen this too, unfortunately. Commits, PRs, # of stories. You get silliness from supposed "engineers" who will inflate the points for stories they work on and downplay points for stories others work on. It's pathetic.

bee_rider 3y ago
If your employment and career path are tied to some ridiculous metric, and you (and everyone else) have to game it, that seems more like a systemic failure. It is pathetic that the company has set things up like that. Can’t blame the person for playing the dumb game if it puts food on the table.
- czechdeveloper 3y ago
  It's not like engineers struggle, so playing such games against your colleagues is totally moral failure.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Of course I can.
uncertainrhymes 3y ago
I strongly believe you will get exactly the behavior you incentivize for. I used to apply this mostly to sales people -- if their bonus depends on new business, you will get a large number of soon-to-be-unhappy customers. It works more generally though ... if management sets a metric, people will try to game it. On the flip side, you can't just have abstract 'quality' or 'customer satisfaction' because it is hard to know if you are really improving. I've never seen this solved once your scale gets past the small-group-of-people-with-a-shared-dream.
- badpun 3y ago
  Why do people just roll over and accept such bullshit? When have workers become such pussies? A century ago, people risked their lives (and some died) striking to improve working conditions. Today, people just accept management's asinine policies. Perhaps people are so checked out that they don't care if the policies make any sense at all, as long as they get their paychecks on time.

malermeister 3y ago

Facebook, for one. Source: I've sat in on meetings where engineers were ranked, with # of commits being a key metric. That experience taught me the importance of making lots of small commits, more than any readability concerns ever could :)

Loughla 3y ago
I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field?
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field? You answered your own question. Management doesn't want to view engineering as a "creative field". In their ideal world, they want it to work like an assembly line. And for decades they've attempted to quantify it like an assembly line. But as of 2023, management has never been more wrong. A good question is, "Why does management even desire quantification?" The answer to this is rather simple and unbelievable to most engineers toiling so hard. The answer is - management (of all levels) is lazy and unskilled. They want to demonstrate to their bosses that they are running an efficient ship. They quantify it with # of commits or other such proxies. This gets them their own promotions. They don't care if the company survives or if their reports are working on the right things or if engineering challenges differ from one project to another. The most important thing for all managers is - their own promotion.
- pjbeam 3y ago
  It isn't, at all. It's laziness on the part of management.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  In general it is considered good to make lots of small commits, a commit is a bundle of changes you send to the shared project, you want to keep them small so they are easy to integrate and debug (if necessary). But just counting them is a dumb way to judge productivity, and every programmer hates it. The way to become a manager at a tech company is to be good at programming for a long time, an extremely specialized skill set that has nothing to do with management.

hx8 3y ago

Just look for the ones hiring MBAs.

IKantRead 3y ago

I would say most startups are guilty of this, though they don't attempt to formalize the measurements. At least from a few places I've been recently, "productivity" is viewed as the number of PRs you push through. QA of any sort is viewed as a waste of time, and it's far better to just push a PR today then take an extra day sanity check your work. On top of this user facing, demo-able, code is much more important than any back-end or infra work. This means the priority is rapidly releasing 90% of the way done products/features and moving on to the next thing. Heck if there's a small bug in the code you just shipped (and of course releases are nightly because that's how you show that you're really moving) all the better since it means you get another easy PR when someone else discovers it.

badpun 3y ago
That makes sense, given how startups (at least those VC funded) are defacto quasi-scams with a goal of creating an illusion of an unicorn, and then quickly flipping it in an IPO, and happily running away with the money. For such purpose, creating functionality that looks as if it works, but in reality is incomplete and buggy, may be just as good as the real thing. It's all about maintaing the charade until the key people can exit rich (preferably as quickly as possible).
- IKantRead 3y ago
  This does align pretty well with my experience. Especially when I've seen multiple ideas that are clearly valuable to customers but not flashy enough for VCs get quickly deprioritized.