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by serial_dev 917 days ago
Even as a developer (mobile app developer) I feel like one has to be careful not to work on "cost center" things.

Accessibility, observability, good logging, testing infrastructure improvements, CI/CD tweaks, stability, better linting and analyzer issues are all important, but you will be rewarded if you ship features fast.

This year I spent too much time on the former because I felt like that's what the team and app needed, because nobody on the team priorized these issues, and I'll be sweating at the end of the year performance reviews.

Now knowing this, I understand why the others didn't want to work on these items, so next year, I'll be wiser, and I'll focus on shipping features that get me the most visibility.

Sorry for the bugs in the app, but I need a job to pay my mortgage.
1 comments
tstrimple 917 days ago
The purpose behind all those things you were pursuing (apart from accessibility) should have been to increase the rate at which the team is able to ship features. If your work on these items over the course of a year haven't demonstrably improved delivery speed, then what value did they actually bring? If they have improved delivery speed and you can show evidence for that, why would you be nervous going into a review?
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hj3939393d 917 days ago
> demonstrably improved delivery speed

Thinking this can be reduced to a single metric is the blight of modern software (and business in general, I think). Mapping an individual change to improved delivery speed is in the vast majority of cases an impossible task and any decent developer knows this. It's management+ that wants simple easy metrics since they lack the deep understanding required to do their job well. Software development is - despite management's hopes - not line work. It's much more akin to R&D. The line work gets eaten up by AWS.

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tstrimple 916 days ago
If you can’t prove your contributions are worthwhile, you’re not going to get recognition. People putting out fires get recognition because they are solving visible and urgent problems. If your work reduces the chances of those fires, it should be measurable otherwise what is the point? Do you honestly believe someone who has spent a year “improving processes” but cannot measure the impact of that year of work deserves glowing praise?

And it’s not that managers don’t understand developers and the work they do. It’s that a lot of developers don’t engage at all with what a business actually does. They are working at IKEA while trying to convince management to use the nice dovetail joints instead of that garbage dowel based assembly. Not only do dovetails look better, they are substantially stronger! All very true statements from a craftsman woodworker. But a complete failure to understand the business and how and why it operates as it does and the value they are expected to provide within it.

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carbotaniuman 916 days ago
It's wild that in this thread we're still falling victim to the McNamara fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

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