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by throwaway737max 763 days ago
It's hard to find a metric that can't be gamed. Otherwise we would not have this issue in the first place. You would also get a lot of office politics and an unfriendly work environment, because everyone would want the projects that would have the highest visibility.

All to often there are invisible "heroes" who quietly fix issues, prevent bugs and makes sure everything runs smoothly. They are simply not as visible as someone who creates high profile features and firefight bugs introduced by their coding. From the management point of view they are hard workers that work late fixing issues.

Management can only recognize what they can see. The quiet dev who just makes things work is a huge value to the company, while the "bro" that master the political game gets all the recognition.

What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?
2 comments
willcipriano 763 days ago
You can probably see some variation of the logic in your comment on here on a daily basis.

I argue that it's management's job to know what's going on well enough that "invisible heros" don't exist. If they can't, what exactly are they managing?

I've been in the situation you describe and I just find another job, what may be invisible to your current manager may be obvious to your future one.

*Bonus content: I suspect most of the time the reason people don't "see things" is for political/human reasons more so than they are blind. You probably didn't seem as interested in your bosses new Tesla as he would've liked or something.

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johnnyanmac 762 days ago
>What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?

You're right, goodheart's law. But I do think the current metrics can definitely be improved.

We can definitely identify "quiet heroes", but people look towards others like them. For management, that's exactly those "high visibility", constantly reporting hype men (who can be high or low performers). Introverted IC's can still perform miracles, an introverted manager who spends most of their times in meeting would definitely struggle. Even if those skills are not necessarily what is needed to perform optimally at some roles, that is what managers seek out of everyone. Because that's how they got to where they were, after all.

There are ideas out there, but ultimately nothing will change until we can at least admit these biases first.

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