I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been closely following Agile is Anarchy, or some recent “how do we work” conversations at work, or what, but Monday morning this rant popped into my head, almost full blown, and what do I even have a blog for if not for posting rants about software development?

So, here’s the deal, just in case you’ve forgotten or were never told: pretty much every single way management tries to measure software team productivity is bullshit. You’re not measuring what you think you’re measuring, generally; what you are measuring is how good your dev team is at gaming your metrics. (Spoiler: they’re probably going to be extremely good, especially if they’re experienced.) I assume everybody has heard the “we paid bonuses for fixing bugs” story — or if you haven’t, you can probably extrapolate — but the key thing here is: almost every single thing you can measure, the devs can game.

so what does matter?

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Most of the work week was spent in a training about Agile methodologies in highly-regulated environments, and if you know what all those words mean when used in those particular combinations, you can probably guess how my week went. (On the plus side, I made a lot of progress on a little side-quest project that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten to, so…)

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Pretty much just another week? It was my first week in the on-call support rotation at work, but it was (mostly) quiet…

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I spent most of the week fighting a cold — not feeling sick enough to not work, but also struggling with keeping my voice, with finding times in between meetings to blow my nose again, and consuming what felt like gallons of herbal tea — which my body insisted on converting directly into mucus.

Do not recommend.

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I spent a good chunk of the week down in the Bay Area, for a couple work meetings — managed to see pretty much exactly nothing other than the inside of a conference room and the inside of a hotel room, but I did get to meet my entire team for the first time, and we got a little bit of time Wednesday afternoon to have our first real in-person team hangout, which was cool.

Flew down Monday, came back Thursday, then took Friday off recover and to to hang out with Mx19 for a little bit before they headed back to college very early Saturday morning — managing to get in and get back to their dorm in advance of the foot of snow they were predicted to get on Sunday.

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