Hacker News Reader

Too much time is spent generating metrics for non-technical managers to evaluate the productivity of engineers.

The best way to evaluate the productivity of engineers would be to determine if their peers see them as a top performer, a net positive or a net negative. If somebody is a net negative, get rid of them. If somebody is a top performer, make sure they're compensated accordingly and kept happy so they don't leave. If somebody is a net positive then you should be satisfied that you aren't stuck with a net negative. Any attempt to evaluate software engineers beyond this is going to be inherently arbitrary.

If you invent arbitrary metrics, your engineers will often have to choose between doing work or gaming the metrics.

There's a guy on my team who everyone thinks is a bad programmer and general looks down on, but he is always willing to help, does a thorough job and writes generally decent code. I have no idea where his reputation came from, but it would be a shame if he were let go based on his peer evaluation.

If he does a good job and is always willing to help, that sounds like a net positive to me. It just might be that there are a lot of toxic team members

Reply on news.ycombinator.com