The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.
Not sure why this post doesn’t have a ton of comments. It illustrates the fundamental problem with KPIs and performance measurement. When it comes to measuring human production with digital tools, because the binary measure is so restrictive, it leaves out a universe of values and information that is just ignored as a result. And this very often has dramatic consequences.
Myopic decision-making is a standard human fault. The problem is that some Deciders have wildly disproportionate effects on everyone else. (i.e. leadership roles across business and government)
We can’t fix individual ignorance and prejudice to a level that will resolve the issue, so maybe we need to invest our efforts in forcibly distributing power to make sure one person (or a small group) can’t unilaterally ruin thousands or millions of lives.
Not sure why this post doesn’t have a ton of comments. It illustrates the fundamental problem with KPIs and performance measurement. When it comes to measuring human production with digital tools, because the binary measure is so restrictive, it leaves out a universe of values and information that is just ignored as a result. And this very often has dramatic consequences.
Posts tend to generate a lot of comments by:
being funny, spurring people to try to be funnier (usually failing); or,
by being interactive, spurring people to answer a prompt in the premise of the post; or,
by being controversial, spurring people to argue.
This isn’t particularly funny or interactive. And it’s not very controversial either; I think most programmers will agree with this premise.
Myopic decision-making is a standard human fault. The problem is that some Deciders have wildly disproportionate effects on everyone else. (i.e. leadership roles across business and government)
We can’t fix individual ignorance and prejudice to a level that will resolve the issue, so maybe we need to invest our efforts in forcibly distributing power to make sure one person (or a small group) can’t unilaterally ruin thousands or millions of lives.
Most experienced developers already agree with you