Very good article, managers just want short summaries of what's going on and sometimes these summaries come in the form of bad metrics.
The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
31–40 of 385 posts
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#32Was Tim hired as a teacher or trainer? What I find strange is that it sounds like Tim was not doing any individual work. As a very experienced programmer, I'm sure that I could increase the productivity of other programmers by pairing with them all day. However, is that actually the best and most productive use of my time? In my estimation, I think that overall team productivity would be maximized if I spent approxim…
> Was Tim hired as a teacher or trainer? Do you think that's any relevant? Software development engineers in general are hired to work on projects as part of small teams, and their goal is to deliver projects. It's not story points, it's not burn down charts, it's not PRs, it's not LoCs touched. It's how many projects are delivered, and keep everything and everyone problem free. This means that if you are struggling,…
> If you can unblock yourself by having a team member sit besides you and walk through a problem, that team member will be helping the team.
I don't dispute that; hence the 20-30% pairing. But if it's the case that all day, every day there's at least one person on the team who is blocked, then you don't need a "Tim", what you really need is a new team, because that's an unacceptable level of blockage.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#33Sounds like Tim was the manager. What exactly was the paid for manager doing?
Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. With less experienced developers he would patiently let them drive whilst nudging them towards a solution. That's not a management activity - that's the kind of coaching you would expect from a senior IC ("Individual Contributor" - I still hate that term.) Generally I would expect a "manager" to have authority over other people in the company: run perfo…
I can't quite tell what the manager in this story should have been doing though. Where is their value add? If its just MBA fluff playing psycho games with metrics then I'd argue they can get fucked.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#34Was Tim hired as a teacher or trainer? What I find strange is that it sounds like Tim was not doing any individual work. As a very experienced programmer, I'm sure that I could increase the productivity of other programmers by pairing with them all day. However, is that actually the best and most productive use of my time? In my estimation, I think that overall team productivity would be maximized if I spent approxim…
I've been the TL for a team of effectively 5 new grads before. Effectively all of my time was spent teaching them how to solve problems, fixing (preventing) bugs in their code from getting committed, and writing boilerplate, or infra code that would never be listed on whatever a story point is. But constrained their responsabilities into a format and structure that would play well with each other's so they would stop constantly rewriting each other's code every other week.
I enjoy teaching so that was a much more enjoyable way for me to spend my day, than drinking caffeine and cranking code the rest of the team couldn't understand. I joined that team because they were constantly missing deadlines. When I left that team they were finally ahead of schedule, but much more importantly they had a code base they all understood. That wouldn't have been true if I'd just written all the code myself. I like to tell myself I could have gotten the team ahead of schedule as a solo endeavor writing 80% of the code myself. But true or not, when I left I would have no confidence the team could continue without me.
Could I have spent more time writing code? Probably, but what delivered the most businesses value? I was hired as a glorified software engineer but instead of delivering code, I delivered a team that could produce code. Their manager was *never* gonna do that. So should I have prioritized doing what my job title said? Or doing what's in the best interests of the long term mission? Every situation is gonna be different, if teaching is soul crushing for you, or more importantly, the team refuses to be taught, I would suggest just deliver code. In this case, everyone wanted to learn, so that was the easiest path forward.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#35Used to be bitten by stuff like this until I figured out something Tim and this author apparently didn’t - the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. he can ask his teammates to do this and they gladly will, or, nice teammates will usually throw a “figured this out with the help of @Tim” in the ticket. goes a long way to keep “tim” on your team again…
You're absolutely right, but some people just refuse to play silly games. It's odd that the manager isn't ever in the room with the team and doesn't understand his team's dynamics. Giving the benefit of the doubt, he must have been new, but any manager worth his salt will ask people on their team what the team dynamics are.
My understanding is that metricizing like this is a tangible way for managers to defend "underperforming" team members to upper management. Your manager can always say you're a valuable member of the team and that will certainly go quite a way, but it's even more powerful if your manager can say, XYZ is an I valuable team member, if you need evidence of that, they provide a lot of value in supportive roles like on these tickets. [Listing tickets].
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#36Honest Question: Are there any metrics around developer productivity that actually work? Reading stories like this and others over the years I've come to the conclusion that you simply can't measure developers productivity on a granular level, it's just about the final product. However, I would love to be proven wrong.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#37Tim would do well in these times of LLMs. They can write code faster than anybody but also need more guiding and coaching than anybody. They don't learn anything no matter how much we call it machine learning. These days what we most need is a Tim of Tims - somebody who coaches software engineers into becoming Tim.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#38Used to be bitten by stuff like this until I figured out something Tim and this author apparently didn’t - the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. he can ask his teammates to do this and they gladly will, or, nice teammates will usually throw a “figured this out with the help of @Tim” in the ticket. goes a long way to keep “tim” on your team again…
That doesn't work with automated metrics, whomever is assigned the work item gets all the points.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#39Damn. Now that I read this I realize why my current team feels like nothing gets done and the reason is the team has no Tim.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#40Used to be bitten by stuff like this until I figured out something Tim and this author apparently didn’t - the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. he can ask his teammates to do this and they gladly will, or, nice teammates will usually throw a “figured this out with the help of @Tim” in the ticket. goes a long way to keep “tim” on your team again…
> the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. I don't think this comes even close to solving the problem. This in fact makes the problem worse, because a) you admit the metric is shit and does not reflect work, b) you opt to keep the bullshit metric but instead try to manipulate it to bump the score under some scenario. That's not desirable outcome by…
While a number measuring productivity may not work, I read the GP as simply recording contributions.
I like that approach. Now you can not only have peer recommendations, but also tangible records.