What McKinsey got wrong about developer productivity
leaddev.com
leaddev.com
>“The McKinsey framework will most likely do far more harm than good to organizations – and to the engineering culture at companies. Such damage could take years to undo,” Orosz and Beck argue.
I would go further and say it will likely damage user experience too. Cranking out features to game productivity scores and ignoring outcomes is a good way to get bloat, bugs, cluttered and overly complex UI, and an overall degraded user experience.
In the "old" days, there was an infinite amount of basic software to write (Operating Systems, file editors, compilers, etc.) and very few developers working on extremely expensive equipment. They had to write software that would just work, features were added based on need, and the idea of a continuous, high-effort, software development activity for a piece of software wasn't the rule. Once the job was done, the developers simply got paid and moved on. Updating, patching, etc was hard to do.
So the incentive was to deliver high-quality working software that did what it needed to do for decades without there being a continuous development effort to keep it "updated" because you only got paid by moving on to new jobs.
Today, the theme is CI/CD, which translates into "figure out how to keep an overstaffed engineering department occupied long after they delivered the working system". This translates into shipping broken, buggy, incomplete, software with the intention to keep the department occupied over the long-term with bug fixes, patches, feature updates and releases, and probably the occasional all-up rewrite. The industry says that the ideal form of this is to not only push releases every so often but to do it continuously in a never ending unbroken stream of work. But what happens when the software really is "done"?
The answer is that we see it all the time. Often in various forms of enshittification (i.e. rent-seeking). Feature reductions, refactoring parts of a perfectly working system stack, changing languages.
The incentive is to vertically integrate rent-seeking, companies are incentivized to seek new monetization sources (I want to say as a way to grow their business, but often it's to keep paying a crushing labor pool), down to developers who aren't incentivized anymore to ship-and-move-on. We also see other bizarre symptoms like taxi companies writing scalable message passing services and geospatial systems, or social networking companies building state of the art AI systems.
So here's an idea, what if the way it should work is thus?
- Developers are payed by the job, they pre-negotiate the price and the payment cadence (monthly, milestone, etc.)
- Groups of developers could form an Agency if they want to centralize the negotiating and business bits.
- Companies hire developers or Agencies for the job. A certain level of bug fixes are included in the contract. (x-number of months, so many bugs, certain number of hours, etc.)
- Feature updates are new jobs.
- Terms to include: "so long as we continue to use the software on our systems, the developers will get payed residuals." Modeled on how other Agency-based industries like acting or music continues to pay-out for use of the systems.
- Good developers can end up on a big passive income stream, and could either continue working in the industry, or perhaps start spending part of or all of their time working on open-source projects that could provide reuse across projects within their industry.
- The Best developers could go into a company, negotiate a nice contract, and the job could mostly be to yank the code out of a repo, compile, configure and run -- then collect passive income for the next few years as the company gets value out of that simple exercise.
It's not the effort of the developer that bring value to the company, it's the value of the solution, so why doesn't the industry incentivize that?
CI is only about what happens before software is delivered.
And I don't see what CD has to do with staff size.
I think you're pointing out valid problems and misattributing their causes.
In real world I regularly CI/CD pipelines reflects to delivery/product managers how fast features are churned out by team to be presented to business. A 10K ft view of CI/CD is often used by group leads, executives to show whats being achieved even at company level.
JIRA is supposed to track work that is to be done. Now JIRA is used to generate work when none exist because if there are hundred JIRA ticket resolved this week there must have lot of work done.
Google likely has a dedicated team who do nothing but tweak the front page of www.google.com
I bet there's a Kanban-like board somewhere within that team with tickets like "change the button for image search to new branding icon" and "move the "About" button to the left-most upper corner from the right-most upper corner." "Make the corners on the search box more round" or whatever.
Looking at the page now, somebody definitely had to generate work, and some poor front-end developer definitely had to perform the work to put the "Our third decade of climate action: join us".
Every couple of years the team will take on some kind of task like moving the front-page to a new internal framework, or connecting it to some new search/advertising API. Remember when google would show real-time search results as you typed?
"Let's put a Pacman game as the logo!"
Here's Google's front page from 10 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20130101000532/http://www.google...
Somebody is making those changes, they exist. The decision to CD that page keeps them around.
However, there is effectively almost no perceptible difference in the program performance, features, capabilities, or really even the aesthetics of that page in that time period to the user.
It should be on maintenance mode with checking in on it being a part-time job for a single person. I bet that there's more than a dozen people who's sole job it is to keep that page "fresh".
That's how CD results in inflated team sizes -- it's the "C". CI/CD never makes it over the wall into CM (continuous maintenance) and as a result becomes it.
With exception of perhaps top end of successful commercial products or some usable patents during development of technology most developers do not get any passive income no matter how much good work is delivered over decades. Everyone is just about as good as their next JIRA task completion. This all just means half-assed broken, bloated feature deliveries which is to be fixed in next scrum or whatever.
I disagree on this causal part: That malaise does not exist because Machiavellian engineers created a job-security program stealthy enough to persistently escape action from bean-counting executives.
Instead, it's caused because other business stakeholders are paying a premium in order to avoid deeper commitment of some sort.
A few examples:
* They want to avoid the risk of a big innovative product that may be a similarly-big flop.
* They can't bear to drop any customers by streamlining the product, always adding bells and whistles to appeal to the potential client du jour.
* They are unable/unwilling to spend/risk political capital in substantially altering how their own corporate structure operates.
* The company's leadership isn't capable of making different business-units work in harmony so the software becomes a slow battleground/mediator of their competing interests.
you are looking at it from the wrong end. This model is prefered and delivers better results because nobody was able to say what the "complete" sofware should look like. So better to deliver MVP and ask the users what they want to change rather than develop something for years only to discover that its very bad fit.
We had "complete" software for decades. You can use an iterative development model until all of the major goals are achieved then ship a final product. After that it's just maintenance.
Iterative development has consumed the ship and maintenance parts of product delivery to the point that the industry no longer even can recognize or remember that such a thing can exist.
Enshittification is the result because if you keep going in and messing with a shipped product, the temptation to try to squeeze it for revenue when its market maxes out becomes irresistible. Modern development practices like CI/CD were invented to enable this behavior and really only build value during the earlier core development stages. After that it becomes an extractive process.
It's kind of like how when colonial powers were building railroads in India, or Korea, or wherever. The intention was to use the rail lines to extract resources from the colonized territory, but the side effect is that the local people in the country also suddenly had improved transportation infrastructure and oh yeah, jobs. For a while the people who work on or near the rail line "prosper" but nobody remembers that the goal was to suck all of the lifeblood out of the countryside and move it to the ports. Once the line is complete the model flips to extraction and the development activity ceases, and everybody who had previously prospered because they could use the rail line to get jobs, education and health care wonders why life sucks now.
well or its not, depends on the industry but most likely there will be new features etc. You need to be able to ship security features and bug fixes continously - e.g. without manual user action because most users simply don't have mental capacity to upgrade software. Alas continous delivery.
It could be more interesting, but then again, it's just work.
This does work. It just requires a sales staff. And usually a 'bench' (the ability to pay developers in-between jobs).
And to be clear: it's only one way of approaching the current set of problems caused by well-intentioned management consultants.
FYI: The cult-classic movie "Office space" actually dealt with what the fallout from management consultants looks like (specifically with software development)
In most agency-based industries, the workers don't get paid between gigs, only during. Good workers hunt around for good agents, and they can make massive amounts of money per job with the agents getting a handsome cut for their job working as sales staff.
> one trick ponies are the order of the day. So that would mean shedding staff, which looks bad
What I think I'm arguing is that most companies really don't need dedicated full-time staff in that way. Agency models work well in many industries that are built around one-trick ponies, which I'm arguing is what most development really is.
In those industries there really isn't a negative connotation to ending a project, shipping it, saying goodbye and thanks for the hard work to the team who did it. If they did a good job and the activity was successful, many of them will likely be hired back for the next job anyways.
I'm not saying that the framework is good, but this specific criticism to it seems wrong.
Now whether McKinsey is actually delivering on that idea, or just exposing the implicit assumptions of "don't be an asshole and don't do things that are harmful to everybody else" and encouraging dropping them, is a problem.
- Measure everything you your systems allow you to, maybe tweak some workflows, but don't add complexity or cost just for metrics.
- Separate metrics into stuff that needs to stay the same (mostly operational efficiency metrics) and stuff that needs to change (strategic metrics) and spend more time on the latter.
- Don't compensate or reward people based on them, just look at them a lot and if you see something that looks weird then talk to your managers about why, and if they can't answer or won't take action then that's all you need to know to reward them.
- If you want to use metrics to create competition just publish a leaderboard and let peer pressure do the rest. People will work hard to be at the top of a public list even if there is no explicit reward for it.
Just be a manager, manage the people, and use metrics that help you manage the people. You won't sell many consulting engagements that way tho.
You can't measure any productivity that has any cognitive component.
Devs think it's ok when sales productivity is measured like this, and then they don't understand that this is the reason sales are selling features that don't exist. We need to all stand against this madness. This goes for teachers, sales people, programmers, doctors, everything.
Are you able to elaborate on why this is true please?
The company as a whole makes a profit, how do you know what it would have been if feature X wasn't implemented? And ten people had a role in deciding to implement it, four in implementing it.
How can I possibly put a number on my contribution?
Your number won't be exact, but it doesn't have to be and double counting among the other people isn't always bad.
That I work on the front ends was only partly my choice, we all move around depending on where we need people at that time, and other people decide what needs to be implemented.
If we were to fire all developers, we would probably lose hardly any sales the first year. But over time, licenses would go down more and more. So part of this year's profit is due to the work of people who left us years ago.
I don't see any point in claiming some specific part of our profit. People would laugh at me, probably.
I remember once being a similar conversation regarding a training program I was working on, and the customer was trying to assess the value of the training not on the improved performance of the employees, but on some measurable "knowledge unit" that had been transferred to the student (regardless of their ability to retain it).
It was beyond frustrating.
The goal is to measure people's results. It might occasionally take a relatively-long time to find a seemingly-simple solution. But if an engineer /always/ takes a long time to find every solution, and upon inspection the problems were not actually difficult, then you most likely have a low-productivity engineer on your hands.
1. solved the original problem, took 2 days and thousands of lines of code 2. changed the problem, took 20 minutes 50 lines of code 3. changed the problem in another way, took 2 days and thousands of lines but this solution solved TEN problems
Now, which one is "better"? It makes no sense.
This is daily life in every tech company. It’s true that in some cases it’s hard to accurately rank between two people (because the work is multidimensional) but in many many cases the discrepancies in productivity are obvious.
Understanding and measuring productivity can be valuable to a business. Sure they can't measure productivity for some roles as precisely, simply, and accurately as say counting the number of jelly beans in a jar.
But that doesn't mean productivity can't be measured in a way that is useful to the business. There's just tradeoffs involved.
"Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00pm, she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this: Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
--Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Your employers aren’t optimizing for your personal productivity and happiness. They don’t mind if you waste 1000s of hours with poker cards and Fibonacci numbers if their business goals are met. This can mean making one person upset and less productive if it makes progress towards a bigger goal.
Just because you don’t see the progress and don’t like the process doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made.
This is a common misunderstanding about market economies vs communism btw. In market economies there's a floor to the incompetence. In communism there is none. The ceiling isn't really different, but since there's a floor in one you will get a natural average higher in market economies. Pro-market people get this wrong all the time.
Imagine if the tables were turned. Developers present in all sales meetings and asking each individual sales person how much they think the call to this client is going to take in terms of story points. And how about we also go to HR and start interrogating them how many story points it takes to give somebody their office key? Busywork might be fun, but companies can do with much less, and achieve the same, or more than they do now.
After 15 years in the industry and being both an IC, a manager, and currently a VP of Engineering, I can confidently state that the best strategy one can take to achieve their business goals is to leave the software engineering to the software engineers and step the heck out of their way.
Wasting the time of people actually doing the work by arbitrary rituals you read about in a blog somewhere is not a good strategy for success. If we must go bother someone and treat them like children and force them to play cards, let's do it with another department for a change.
I think we should do this! People should be able to explain their processes and where their effort goes with a decent amount of accuracy.
> Busywork might be fun, but companies can do with much less, and achieve the same, or more than they do now.
A dangerous assumption to apply to all companies. Also the trick is deciding what "much less" looks like. Better hope you pick the right things.
I'm not saying it can't be done. It's just hard. And in some cases, you'd rather just be 10% less productive (but still productive) by following a process you hate.
The fundamental point I think everyone misses is that as organizations get larger, the network cost of running is higher and nobody has solved that problem. Smaller problems are more quickly solvable and no amount of story points will change that.
So you're saying that it's impossible to measure developer productivity at all, since it's cognitive work? Strong disagree.
All of us here that work with other developers know that some of their peers get more done than others. Or conversely, that there's a few in the team who don't seem to get much done. The minute you make even that simple assessment, you've measured productivity.
One of the jobs of eng managers is to then make this measurement as accurately, realistically, and fairly as possible. This guides bonuses and raises, which should reflect people's contributions.
I'm not defending McKinsey's proposal here, but I agree with the general notion that it's possible to measure productivity and this is something management should always be doing.
Especially because there are also skill differences and the differences in job title and salary that come with that. So the level of difficulty of the work people get to do is also different, and so on.
The problem is people realise they can gain as much from playing political games as they can from improving productivity. Once that starts everything goes to shit.
I don’t understand your position. Is it that all developers are equally productive, or that they do vary in productivity but it is immeasurable, an æther, with literally zero signals one could possibly mine to see how valuable a developer is to the team?
Soccer is a good metaphor because it's EASY to measure/see the value a good player that does not shoot a lot of goals make. In programming this is not the case.
It's certainly the case that managers that want hard numbers and don't know how to code won't be able to understand the situation at all. This is why this McKinsley nonsense is so dangerous.
"Better" isn't linear. It can multiply, and it can be highly dependent on the rest of the team.
Can you elaborate?
We take exams at school for basically the same reason.
You have to set up an institution or structured lessons to get the higher levels of cognitive measurement.
A company can use an educated guess for cognitive ability. Usually made up from completed tasks.
Selling features that don't exist is a side-effect of the company culture.
It's easy to observe the business culture in the West is often well divorced from academic truth seeking. As a matter of fact and good business.
I’m not sure you can make such a broad statement.
This argument is blatantly false. (I mean the argument not the claim it's arguing for)
As just one counterexample, writing a mathematical proof often requires a lot of creative problem solving (it's not done a lot in school for this very reason). However, checking that a proof is correct is a rote task, even automatable (see proof asistants).
Measuring outcome and impact gets messy when the developers aren’t the ones deciding what to work on.
I had a VP of Engineering who was all about measuring impact and ignoring everything else. He was also adamant that product people decided what we work on, while engineers decided how it was implemented.
This created an environment where your fate was determined almost entirely by what product team you got assigned to. If your product managers wanted you to implement a feature nobody wanted, it didn’t matter how well you did. You weren’t going to be able to show positive impact if nobody used it.
Impact is only a good measure when you let people make their own decisions.
A more generous take: when a business or project is stagnating due to bad management and communication, almost any advice that leads to change improves the situation. Especially when the situation is such due to some "principal actor" type issues, introducing more actors with different inscentives can rebalance things in the short term.
(These are the same guys that tell countries with successful agricultural sectors to embrace corporate farming. Cui bono?)
Also, you can obtain more information about what your competitors are doing in that area, not like illegal levels of information, just, more than you have without them.
Make no mistake, these are all valuable services that large companies will pay a lot of money for.
Imagine all the effort that goes into marketing, networking, and greasing the wheels of business that goes into selling this and you'll more readily appreciate why McKinsey keeps appearing in spots they have no business being involved in. Their product isn't a good or sound outcome, it's paying the fee to be able to append "McKinsey said..." onto a decision.
- were an instrumental part in creating Big Tobacco's strategy of "distract and create doubt, then delay, delay delay"
- applied the same playbook with Big Oil
- helped create the opioid epidemic
- give advice to multiple oppressive regimes (e.g Saudi/Russia)
Seems legit, let me take my engineering advice from these guys, they must know what they are talking about...
Edwards Deming, who in terms of process optimization, is (in my carefully considered opinion) head and shoulder above everyone I’ve ever encountered pushing related ideas in software development, challenges the idea of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. His belief was it’s far more important to understand the system in which a worker operates, after which you can absolutely make improvements affecting global output without a local measure.
As for the last sentence, they buried the lede.
And let's not forget, the incentive for McKinsey is to develop a product they can sell. How good that product is and it's "unintended consequences" are a distance second. McKinsey needs something billable, something upper management and leadership will buy into. Rarely is that the soft metrics. Many of us know what lack of appreciation for the soft metrics feels like as an employee. (Hint: it sucks.)
I think that speaks to how extremely well designed Redis was from the very start - it's been remarkably stable over time, and those original ideas are still very much applicable 13 years later.
(I did read a recent 40-page glossy PDF on effects of AI on job sectors. I thought it was slightly over-confident but done well enough)
[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
Any productivity measure that isn’t derived from ROI is 100% guaranteed organic grass fed BS.
Increasing “productivity” can actually reduce global ROI.
I highly recommend looking into the Theory of Constraints.