Comment by tetha

The thing is: Different levels of experience need different measures of success, up to the point of leeway from the normal measurements of success.

Like, for someone in tier 1 / tier 2 helpdesk, or the regular developer pushing relatively normal tickets through, simple ticket or story throughput is one indicator of productivity. As long as you pair it with some success measurement, like re-reports from people within a short time, or work caused by the implementation. Or just feedback from the rest. Someone has to put down code to make the feature work in the end.

But this changes when you get more specialized and overall more experienced. If we bring a new technology into the team, my productivity based on the first metric will drop to zero. I'll be busy supporting other people. Or, the incidents on my desk will be far more weird ones. Other people get clear click paths and an exception. I had to debug JVM crashes due to faulty hardware. That took a bit longer than an afternoon in a debugger and adding an if-statement, if I may embellish a bit.

But that's why soft skills become important. It's concerning how little that manager knows about his team. But it's also concerning how Tim didn't make sure his manager knows what's going on. For example if we're bringing in new tech, I'm informing superiors first that I'll prioritize support of team-members with the new tech just below business critical incidents and I most likely won't do any regular work for some time.