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by troycarlson 2232 days ago
My thoughts:

* Some teams do this already with git data...but if it's free as part of a team's development platform then maybe the less sophisticated managers who don't know how to interpret the data will misuse it?

* If the editor is heavily instrumented then even more granular "productivity" metrics could be extracted, like time spent with the tab active, etc. which aren't available with a vanilla install of other editors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1 comments

Sounds like a form of (job?) security-through-obscurity, no? The data was always there, but not all managers were savvy enough to process it and weaponize it.

In the end, obscurity is just not a durable defense. Better to earn trust with good managers, and avoid companies that let bad managers flourish. If you don't have the ability to quit a bad manager or bad working environment, then no amount of tooling choices by GitHub/Microsoft was going to save you anyways.

>weaponize it

Oh boy. Had chills from my time as a Jr. Engineer at Accenture. Still remember the day a manager looked at me like I offended his entire family for saying that lines written didn't mean productivity achieved.

It can take years for some to learn that the real metric is how many lines were deleted.