[suchire]

In addition to the manager-to-managee “contract”, there are two other reasons to have goal setting exercises:

- Setting goals rather than tasks can allow for less micromanagement, if used properly. You have a problem to solve, with some freedom to choose how - Measuring individual (or even team) software engineer productivity is super hard. Unexpected problems, necessary research, tech debt, changing requirements, support interrupts, life problems, etc make consistent progress hard to measure, and no one wants to be measured by lines of code or “points closed”. Setting pre-negotiated goals and then achieving them is a more humane alternative

[wonderingdev]

Why do you have to micromanage? Why do you have to measure productivity (especially if the team if productive as a whole - and that's always visible)? Genuinely asking

[jbarrs]

I am not a manager, so I am merely speculating here, but I suspect measuring productivity is important in determining which employees are of most value to the company (who is pulling their weight, so to speak), particularly for example in the cases of raises/promotions or redundancies. Also, different people will have different skills and preferences, so if a team member shows a particular aptitude for a set of tasks and is generally more productive at doing those, it may be better to give more tasks of that style to that team member to boost productivity.

[wonderingdev]

Not sure about that. Also I believe there are alternative to micromanagement for a similar purpose[1].

1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag...