[bcantrill]

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is absolutely terrible leadership advice. Or to phrase it another way, if you could magically transport yourself to work on any team in history, which would be and why? And how did those teams run? How did the leadership function? How did the team think of its own performance? In this regard, I feel history is a much better guide than middle management claptrap admonishing us to all kneel before the false god of Measure Everything.

[synergy20]

I don't buy it fully either, but, I could not figure out what's a better alternative, not in theory, but in practice.

Software projects are notoriously hard to manage indeed, but it has to be managed somehow, Agile approach is a nice try, we had CMMI as well.

Even a neurosurgeon can be measured, why can't software developers, why are software engineers so special? Maybe AI programmer is the way out.

[bcantrill]

So, interesting example: how much do you know about surgery? The best surgeons care about things that are not, in fact measured -- things that amount to the quality of the craft that very much correlate to patient outcomes, but are also hard to measure. Indeed, if you really get a surgeon going, they will complain about the things that are measured -- namely, the number of surgeries that they perform. I know of more than one surgeon who has left their craft because this quantification was essentially forcing them to perform unnecessary procedures!

In general, quantification of human endeavor is fraught with peril -- even in those domains where it would seem to be entirely non-controversial like professional athletics.

[josephg]

The alternative to measuring everything seems obvious. Don’t measure everything.

Why not measure everything? Because measurement has a cost. And some things cost more to measure than you gain from the measurement.

I was on a team once with a product owner who insisted on absolutely everything being in jira with story point estimations. Well, that’s fine and good but one day I sat down with the designer and walked through the product. We made a list of about 30 things that needed fixing - almost all of them trivial. “This is the wrong shade of blue”. “There is too much spacing here”, etc. Well, I made a list in notepad and got going but I got in trouble for not putting it in jira. Only, it would have taken longer to write up these issues than it would have taken to fix them. To say nothing of wasting everyone’s time doing story point estimation. In this case, measuring our work would have cost significantly more than doing the work! We argued back and forth and eventually he admitted he wanted things in jira to appease upper management, who I suppose wanted to know how busy we were by looking at a number on a spreadsheet.

(He ended up writing up all my points in jira himself, guessing costs and ticking them all off as “done”. What a waste of time.)

And no, software isn’t special. Teaching isn’t measured (except maybe with a student survey at the end of the year). Science is measured in citations per lifetime, not micropapers/hr. And you don’t quantitatively measure your spouse, your friends or your enjoyment of mum’s cooking.

Measurement is a lovely tool. But don’t make a religion out of it. I heard a story from a leadership summit recently. A young CEO got up and said “But there’s no way I’d make hiring and firing decisions by gut instinct!”. A bunch of the older people there disagreed immediately, and said that’s exactly what you should do. Train your instincts then trust them to do their job.

[pcthrowaway]

> But there’s no way I’d make ... firing decisions by gut instinct

Well the reason it's so important to hone your gut instinct for good hiring decisions is that you absolutely should have measurements for firing decisions (at least in the US); that decision needs be defensible with data under the scrutiny of a lawsuit

[withinboredom]

You don't need a reason to fire someone in the most of the US (AFAIK). You can just say that they walked in with a red shirt and you don't like red shirts. As long as the reasoning isn't because they are in a protected class, you can pick whatever reason you want.

[pcthrowaway]

Firing someone "because they walked in with a red shirt" would do damage to your company's reputation, and call into question the competence of your management team.

And you can still get sued.

[withinboredom]

I mean. You can get sued for wearing a red shirt. It would probably get tossed out in ten seconds (unless the judge just wants some entertainment). But you can sue anyone for anything. You can do tens of millions of dollars to a company, get fired for it, and sue them. Nothing is stopping you.

Secondly, no one is going to give a shit why you fired someone except the person you fired (if you even told them why), and HR. In fact, most companies don’t even give managers firing authority, but if you are the owner/CEO or someone who does have that authority, it’s possible even HR doesn’t know the reason. That person is just fired.

[synergy20]

not interested in measuring everything, neither do I believe 'measuring nothing because I'm a software developer'

Agile has its merits, abuse it is obviously wrong.

There got be something that is practical and get the job done and benefit all parties in software project management, I'm searching for answers myself.