[irjustin]

I realized why this post rubs me the wrong way.

It complains, but doesn't offer a solution. It simply criticizes and says "all engineers cannot and thusly should not be measured".

The ironic thing is, the blog post is implicitly measuring by not explicitly measuring. The measurement is the bug ticket itself and whatever value attached to it.

But to this end, I generally agree. There are qualitative and quantitative measurements. Quantitative is the value of the ticket commonly ascribed by the team (scrum? agile? whatever). Qualitative should come up in review.

Qualitative is SO HARD. Top down? Team 360? Mixed? But it must be undertaken and refined by the team at each level of the org. Otherwise you will run into the exact situation described by the blog post and you won't know how to judge left from right, good from bad. Maybe the blog post's example isn't that great, too much information is missing to make a solid judgement, but you need to decide who to reward via promotion, annual raises and who to reprimand and who to not change.

But still, all systems are terrible, but you must pick one less it be picked for you.

[fcantournet]

Why do you need to evaluate people constantly and pit them against each other ? Why not give a raise to everyone and see what happens ?

It's how we sent rockets to the moon, it seemed to work ok.

[ebiester]

Because the alternative is based on your manager's impressions. You get fired because "your manager doesn't like you." You get a promotion because "your manager likes you." Your coworker sits around doing very little and nobody notices for a few months.

Your company and boss is sued because someone says their firing was based on discrimination because they can't prove it was for performance.

The truth is that managers can suss out 90% of the problems without a number. However, we are asked to document the hell out of it if we want to do something about it. And twice in my career I've been wrong: I mistook someone who was quiet for not doing much until I dove into the work. I trust my gut, but I confirm with numbers.

[irjustin]

> It's how we sent rockets to the moon, it seemed to work ok.

There are so many problems rooted in this statement. Government program, presidential mandate (i.e. unlimited budget), no competition.

SpaceX is clearly better than NASA except maybe they don't push hard enough nor evaluate their engineers so you have a nice stable job if you do nothing.