[andrewstuart]

>> we haven't really come up with any better metrics than time spent and nr. of things changed per time unit

Does anyone give a shit about metrics any more? I seem to recall the whole metrics thing fizzled out entirely about 15 years ago.

[jillesvangurp]

Individual engineers don't and never did; managers/planners do (at least the more competent ones) and always did. There's a difference between running a bunch of primadonnas and running an engineering organization that gets things done on a schedule & budget consistently. It generally doesn't involve just winging it with some full stack ninjas and hoping for the best and tends to involve lots of planning, KPIs, metrics, resource planning, etc.

[downerending]

There are people that care, but metrics are as useless as ever for measuring programmer quality.

What's that law? Something like "Once a number becomes a goal, it ceases to be a useful measure."

[tfigment]

OKRs are a thing in tech circles. John Doerr wrote a book on it. My company rolled it out and most people struggle with coming up with meaningful metrics for their job.

[karatestomp]

We added OKR junk at an agency I worked at. For developers our options were:

1) use silly, useless metrics that are of a sort management will accept anyway,

2) uselessly tag along with initiatives in areas that are easier to measure (sales, marketing kind of though their metrics are still usually bad, just no-one cares),

3) start a year ago gathering data for a baseline for bad development metrics,

4) start 2-3 years ago gathering data for good development metrics, though they’ll probably still be pretty limited and narrow.

We picked 1 and 2 of course. What a waste of time. I wish anyone who wanted to be more than a line worker anywhere had to answer some basic questions about games and measuring things. Not just in development, managers and directors everywhere are, on average, terrible at it as far as I can tell.