Measuring Engineering Productivity
37 points by can
37 points by can
I thought I'd be more hostile to this post, mostly because I think my understanding of the word "measure" is more loaded than the author, but I think the article's advice is sound for a remote team. I've self-reported on progress async, but instead by posting on Slack then I would post in the tickets themselves, which was really appreciated. Over time my manager stopped asking me for updates and just looked directly in the tickets.
Thanks for the note! I hesitated calling it "measurement" for the same reasons but it is a form of measurement because we did look into the numbers at times. Appreciate you sharing your way of working also!
I like this. I think I'd call it "Evaluating..." or "Assessing..." instead of "Measuring...", because it really is more wholistic than what I usually associate with "measuring", but it feels like a smart counter to Goodhart's Law in service of a useful goal.
I love how you kept the manager as an important piece of the loop. Measuring by metrics misses so much of the impact that an engineer has. But, if a manager is going through these hoops, I'd expect they have a pretty strong pulse on their team.
Yes! I think the bulk of the work should fall on managers' shoulders. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't use their artifacts to "judge" people but since the work is public, the judgements should be more grounded in reality.
I really enjoyed reading your article and I shared it in the slack of my company.
Some people, me included, are very tempted to try a variant of what you suggest for deploy verifications :)
Glad to hear it! Let me know if I can clarify anything about how the deploy verifications worked.
Well-written. Curious if you have thoughts on issue labeling/tracking in a similar vein and how to balance the work on ICs and managers there? E.g. for doing aggregations having labels on things is useful after a period of a few months, but I've found it hard to have ICs do consistent labeling.
Thank you! I wish I had cogent thoughts. I've never seen a system that works for all stakeholders. As you've touched on, it's fun to click buttons around for a few weeks but often it gets tiring and then the fidelity gets in the way of seeing what's actually going on.
If I could say two things a) use a system that requires fewer clicks than you think (e.g. have fewer tags etc) than is comfortable. If you want to err one way, err on the side of being too simple. b) be comfortable declaring bankruptcy. i was surprised at how so many issues don't just...matter. if they are that important, they'll come up again.