"number of code changes submitted is very important"
well, I could do this in one totally reasonable change, or I could do it in three
play stupid performance evaluation games, win stupid prizes
well, I could do this in one totally reasonable change, or I could do it in three
play stupid performance evaluation games, win stupid prizes
Comments
(devs laughing)
“And we are instituting peer code reviews”
This is when you know you're superior has never written code.
Back when I started at the Service Desk we had a Customer requesting our SD to be measured by 1) the amount of resolved tickets and 2) the % amount of cases solved on 1st contact
Setting measurements ain't easy, but doing it wrong is easy.
I want to be fired so bad, I've lost all motivation knowing good work is not noticed.
This was used exactly when reporting on non important issued to look good, to hide what was bad.
Employer offered a bonus for each bug fixed.
A friend of mine: "I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm gonna write me a yacht."
KFC's "chicken efficiency" metric several decades ago a key anecdote in driving action.
Chicken efficiency? Counts chicken tossed for being too old. Solution: Cook to order.
Of course, efficiency went up. Way up.
Customer satisfaction went down bc long waits.
Then profits.
But chicken efficiency? Tops, baby, tops!
But apparently that's also bad, because you're losing your employee-customers!
The Amazon Model tried to aggressively forecast exact amounts needed for a given day - but people don't eat fast food or buy groceries like that.
It just isn't applicable to *food* really
https://www.xkcd.com/2899/
Getting people to write spaghetti code for job security just means whoever replaces them needs to refactor everything and then work on getting their own lines of code out.
Goes to remind people that KPI's are about results NOT activity
- higher LoC per file
- biggest diff per file modified
- number of email notifications dropped to manager per commit to repo
- number of code reviews done during lunch
And we could create our own tix for the most minutae of things
If someone asked "What's the time" I'd create a ticket. "John asked what the time was" Resolution "told him 12:30"
I did have tickets made for any time someone came to the IT room to ask a question and any time I unplugged or restarted printers to name a few though.
Followed very quickly by "why are we getting a ton of $5 sales now"?
Maybe pooling bonuses and then awarding additional "shares" based on employee accomplishments🤔
"Look! we've invented a creative new metric!"
"Cute. My teams are gonna use well known, industry standard, best practice, tried and true metrics that everyone understands and that relate to the goals we set."
"Freak."
🤓
Since about 1/3rd of my job is writing libraries for weird glue bits, almost every time i push to master it causes commits in 30+ other repos.
I didn't get an answer, of course.
Luckily my current org evaluates employees based on added value to the customer, which is amazing
i haven’t heard much about that metric (if you can call it that) in 15 years.
2: Removed erroneous letter E
3: Removed erroneous letter T
4: Added letter T
5: Added letter H
6: Added letter E
That's 21 commits.
Then the dev team helping out on merge requests, being unusually pedantic about formatting, documentation, names of variables etc
Remember in school when your essay had a page requirement? It didn't make you write better, it just made you increase the font size. Same thing happens in the workplace. Look more productive by writing nonsense.
Bonus, yesssss?
Can you communicate well, and provide reasonable estimates to what you say you are going to do? That's a better metric imo.
Not having to need a fucking Key Performance Indicator 😄
At one point it was about quality for the user and stability for the platform. Homogenous concepts to be sure. But isn’t that why we worked hard? To do good stuff and make us happy (and be rewarded for…)
you can rack up lines of code real fast with a bunch of poorly organized unit tests
The author just went and found someone else to approve it, and I'm sure it looked great on their performance review.
(but to inflate line count, mock for each test separately with copy-pasted mocks and hate yourself later when something changes, although I guess that gives good change line count, too!)
I made the job switch after my last company was acquired by a huge global company and they implemented their “code metrics”
if your manager/lead thinks quantity = work = quality then they don’t understand what the fuck software engineering is
Are your bosses stupid?
Instead of deleting or commenting it out wrap it in a "while false" loop.
Heck just drop random code in a "while false"
So they stopped.
Instead, no bug report ever got closed. A steady stream of comments were added, and developers and testers struggled to communicate and get the damn thing working.
"Yes, but this year we are using a new metric that takes lines of code divided by agile velocity multiplied by the meeting engagement coefficient. It's said to be THE most important barometer of performance this year."
"By whom?"