It's beside the point, but grey-on-white fonts give me a headache.
You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
51–60 of 522 posts
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would hope so, but I've seen an Engineering Director at an otherwise well run software company use number of Github commits as the central reason to put someone on a performance improvement plan as recently as 2019. Granted, this was someone who was a professional manager and hadn't been an engineer for the last 90% of their career, and many people were shocked by it, but it happened.
Were they right about the person being a low performer? I'm curious if this is "everybody knows this person isn't doing any work, here's a blindingly obvious metric to use to defend this move to HR" because HR orgs often hate things that don't have metrics attached, or if it's "I don't understand what this person is doing, and I don't see any commits, so it must be nothing"?
Completely valid question, and I think you make a great point here. A lot of baffling managerial behavior is because the manager is working in a baffling bureaucracy. Unfortunately, I think this situation was largely of the latter case, and maybe some motivations I'm not aware of.
They were a senior engineer that spent a lot of time coaching the rest of the team, and less time on their own personal work. The commits data point, in my opinion, should have been the beginning of a conversation that ended with the manager asking this person to adjust their priorities. Instead it was presented as an accusation that the person wasn't getting their work done, which ultimately lead to them feeling insulted and quitting.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#53It’s not just management that feels this way. A lot of junior engineers feel the same way. It’s what leads to bloat because they assume “it can’t be right” if it’s just a small change.
It takes a while for a lot of junior engineers to realize small elegant solutions are better, and requires good mentorship and code review to get there.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#54A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see som…
Ahh, yes. This is so common in my experience as well!
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#55Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
I regularly hear a friend complain about BS like this and variants. "Why did adding a button take a week, it's just a button?!" is also very popular. Not sure what's worse, that or the recurring "that element should be 1px to the left, drop everything you're working on and fix it asap"...
A funny side-effect of this that I ran into: customers who went to tortuous lengths to avoid requesting a new page or button, because they’d had that past experience of ‘just a button’ taking 2 weeks. They still wanted all the new functionality, but glued onto the existing pages/buttons because they thought it would save time! An interesting misunderstanding :)
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#56Actually this is one of the upsides of web development: Since every line contributes to the file size of your software and therefore to the loading time there is a motivation for keeping the code base small. Sadly, there are many projects out there which obviously failed to reach this target at some point.
This can also go suprisingly wrong when management decides code size is the performance metric needed to improve the site and hires a "performance engineer" who abolishes all structure and abstraction in the code, making it near-impossible to debug and maintain. But at least it runs fast.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#57Conclusions: 1. Picking a good manager is very important! 2. Communicating with your manager is very important!
1. Being in a position where you have the privilege of being able to pick a good manager is important :)
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#58Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.
A lot of software development still happens at businesses that are not 'software companies'. The experience is very different, with a much different culture around software.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#59I recall a story about someone at a government contractor who did a major refactoring and removed thousands of lines of code from a project, increasing its performance, only to be told by management that they'd signed a contract that said the company got paid by lines of code delivered, and his improvement would cost them tens of thousands of dollars, so revert the whole thing.
Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
#60[deleted]