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This. I can tell HR, my lead and skip about how good my communication, soft skills and team work have been this year but come comp review they don't give a crapola about any of that. All they look at is how many sloc I've shipped.

For context: I never really cared about yearly reviews or raises at my job before my current job. I knew they were going to be mostly shit anyway and that I was better off job hopping every couple of years to get a “raise”. Which I did six times between 2008 and 2020 after staying at my second job 9 years and getting 3% raises and seeing the bonus drop.

That being said, the only formal raise/promotion process i know about are at tech companies. Promotions are based on “scope” and “impact” and not how well you code. The only time “coding well” comes into play is going from junior or mid.

Even the interviews that determine your leveling is based on behavioral interviews and system design.

I couldn’t interview for my next job and all I could put on my resume is “I wrote a lot of code”

I'm fascinated: does your company/manager truly track SLOC and promote based on that?

Or is SLOC here more of a proxy for "features shipped"?

Because if this is what's happening, I'd encourage two changes:

1. Communicate differently to HR, lead, and skip - either use different approaches of documentation, or point out different aspects of your contributions 2. If trying various different approaches don't work... leave.

For communicating differently - I used to work at a large company, and our yearly reviews had places to capture accomplishments. That was a broad topic: it wasn't just features built, bugs fixed or identified, etc. It would also be totally appropriate to put ways you saved money or time on various initiatives, and I would frequently put down items like this.

How do you communicate "how good" your "communication, soft skills, and team work have been this year"?

It's a black box but the CEO has communicated dev performance is dependent on amount of code shipped. I suspect they're using sloc or pr counts behind the scenes.

I've done everything you're recommending. CEO doesn't care about any of that. Only metric they care about is money made and code shipped.

They do say they care about communication and apparently track it but I havnt seen it reflected in comp reviews so my conclusion is code shipped is the only metric.

We have sloc and pr tracker stat pages so Im making a guess they are using sloc.

Yowza. In that case… time to look elsewhere. I can tell you many companies do not do this sort of thing.

I am. Only issue is that it isn't the worst place I've worked and it's hard to find better than what I have where I'm at.

It's interesting, because I've heard a lot of stories about environments like that, but I've never personally seen one. In every job I've had, the most respected (and highest paid) developers have always been the ones who struggle to find time to write code because they're too busy communicating. It was actually a hurdle for me at the start, and I remember being shocked the first time a manager told me writing lots of good code wasn't enough to get promoted.

> Many times, when someone speaks of a 10x software engineer, the gut feeling is of someone that provides the output (measurable in code) of 10 developers, not that he's able to have an impact in the organization through communication as 10 developers (breaking silo-s, syncing teams, etc), although this might be closer to the truth and what the duties of some staff and principal level developers includes.

Both are 10x developers. One by 10x impact at the code level, the other by 10x impact at the "delivering the right thing the first time" level.

Though, in reality, it's really hard to be a 10x developer without doing both of those things ... a profilic coder who is solving the right problem because they took the time to communicate and understand the real issues.