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I sometimes wonder if developers should do an end run around all this bullshit and come up with and start measuring management productivity metrics. I dont see a downside to doing this.
it's called a labor union
BREAKING NEWS: Pair programming improves software quality, more at 5!
I sometimes wonder if developers should do an end run around all this bullshit and come up with and start measuring management productivity metrics. I dont see a downside to doing this.
"Hey, boss who can fire me, I just thought you should know that we on the team have started keeping metrics. I want you to know that your 'times you made the only girl on the team uncomfortable with a sexist joke' metric is unusually high this month, and your 'unblocked the team by speeding up an external request' metric is 0 for this month, down from 3 times last month" Let me know if you find any downsides. Anyway,…
Well, I like the story here, but it's kinda against a bit of a strawman. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing the overall point of the piece, a point I agree with, but that said a metrics focussed manager could have simply added an "adjunct" label to the stories and had this "worst programmer" add themselves to stories as the non-lead developer. Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the ass…
The funny example is that the hasattr built-in just tries to getattr, and then catches the exception to tell if it has the attribute.
I dislike the just-so aspect of these sort of stories. I'd expect exceptional programmers to do unusually well on most metrics. But that is balanced by the threat of people trying to use metrics to measure developer productivity. It doesn't seem to be possible, any metric falls apart. If people are focusing on a metric, the greats aren't going to be leading any more. It'll be some junior who has misunderstood the sys…
...when they're actually hands-on-keyboard writing software. The best programmers I know write as little code as possible.
Product team: Hmm, we need to do a thing that looks very complex and difficult.
Senior dev: I'll start making a project plan and story breakdown.
Very senior dev: That sounds like a special case of a thing we already have. That should take about an hour.
Of course that's a generalization, but I think the trend holds. The most illustrative metric for the best engineers wouldn't be "lines written" but "lines avoided".
> I explained all this to the manager and invited him to come by and observe us working from time to time. Whenever he popped by, he would see Tim sitting with someone different, working on “their” thing, and you could be sure that the quality of that thing would be significantly better, and the time to value significantly lower—yes, you can have better and faster and cheaper, it just takes discipline—than when Tim w…
Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently write 5000+ lines per code per week, regardless of how many features they actually ship and how many bugs they introduce.
As a team lead and engineer who has managed some complex projects, the idea of someone writing over 2000 lines of code per week terrifies me... That's over 100K lines of code a year. Think of the unnecessary complexity. There is a very good chance that the same feature set could have been implemented with just 10K lines of code, less buggy and in half the time though that would only amount to 380 lines of code per week! Management won't like that.
I tend to think that the dev who can churn out thousands of lines isn't thinking deeply enough about the long term direction of the project; all the code they're writing is essentially throwaway code.
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…