Comment by Clubber
1 month ago
You're absolutely right, but some people just refuse to play silly games. It's odd that the manager isn't ever in the room with the team and doesn't understand his team's dynamics. Giving the benefit of the doubt, he must have been new, but any manager worth his salt will ask people on their team what the team dynamics are.
My understanding is that metricizing like this is a tangible way for managers to defend "underperforming" team members to upper management. Your manager can always say you're a valuable member of the team and that will certainly go quite a way, but it's even more powerful if your manager can say, XYZ is an I valuable team member, if you need evidence of that, they provide a lot of value in supportive roles like on these tickets. [Listing tickets].
Agree on silly games, but this is simply acknowledging others' contributions. I think this should be encouraged in general, metrics or not
I agree. I think it's pretty absurd that the manager was all set to fire him just based on metrics. There's a quote that I'm going to horribly paraphrase that goes like, "when you can measure something, that ends up being the only thing that matters."
At least he asked the author his opinion first.
Having said all that, if he took it upon himself to be a mentor to other developers and didn't do any tickets himself, that seems a bit odd, unless it was explicitly decided/communicated that would be his role. I would think roles like that are half time mentoring and half time doing tickets, but I don't know enough about the team to judge it. Like I said, I'm assuming the manager was new to the team.