A dev's thoughts on developer productivity (2022)

My couple of thoughts, just based on my own experiences, are that: there is typically at least one architect above me(currently two, don't ask me why) that is responsible in doing the higher level solutioning. While I am free to give feedback on things, and that feedback is taken seriously, it is a far cry from developing my own architecture. On a big enough project, there simply isn't enough time to gather requirements, architect the solution, and then build it out(for one person). By the time I am assigned the feature ticket, it is a morsel of the overall thing.

I feel like I have reached a happy point of productivity where I am doing the work expected of me, and at times even exceeding, but not breaking my metaphorical back. The truth is that most companies won't pay for the extra productivity that you create for yourself, but they will happily take it for free.

As a staff engineer with team lead responsibilities I would love to be able to attain that kind of flow. Unfortunately, a lot of my job is liaising with product managers and making sure the team is focused on the right things or writing and reviewing documents.

This work needs to be done but it doesn’t leave me much time to get into coding things and thus I would score very low on that productivity measure because I’m hardly ever in the inner loop.

This really resonates and tracks with my experience. Really like the vector sum concept, as most metrics for productivity tend to be pretty naff (not good).

Some of the issue, in my own admittedly limited experience, is that some "important" folks often want the flashy ideas; they want someone to tell them there's a quick fix or a framework to solve the problem in 3x workshops over two weeks. It's unfortunately human nature to want the easiest solution. edit -- plus i think a lot comes down to fear (no control), which is also a thing.

Managers also like metrics. It makes their end of month presentations look good. Which is important otherwise the team gets looked down on compared to all the other managers with amazing metrics.

But, I could totally see something like this working well at smaller companies where stuff like that isn't a thing.

> staff engineer with team lead responsibilities

Bit of a tangent, but I'm just curious if that's that some staffs (but not all) and above are leads, or if it's that engineering & management tracks are orthogonal but not mutually exclusive?

I was attempted to idly discuss/suggest the latter was a possibility recently (not in a position to effect it), and I'm not sure I made my point very effectively or coherently. If that is the case where you work, are you aware of any sort of name for that or keyword? Hard sort of thing to search for otherwise.

yoke*