Comment by andix
1 month ago
The title should be: Why measuring developer productivity by story points is bad.
I was once part of a team that had a zero-storypoints developer too, let's call him Zero. He always refused to get any stories assigned during planning, his goal was always zero. He felt responsible for delivering all the planned stories and helped the people who struggled. He often came to me and told me to help someone on a specific task, because it was too much for him to help everyone.
This was well understood by management though. Zero took a 4-6 week vacation every year, and management always pushed important releases back if Zero was not there. The team could've done it without him, and it might've been better for the team not to have Zero around for all important releases. But management was scared something could go terribly wrong without him.
Wouldn't Zero be a hero in disguise, then?
When I hear stories about Tim or Zero, it makes sense... with the caveat of whether they are actually transferring knowledge to teammates, and whether the other team members are capable of taking over the function of Tim/Zero. If not, then Zero is just covering for low performers, and your bus factor is still a liability.
In Zero's case, it sounds more like there is knowledge transfer but there's this cult of personality from management's perspective. Almost the opposite of Tim.
It can be scary, but you gotta pass the torch at some point and accept there will be turbulence compared to Zero smoothing out the landing. That's how you get future Zeros/Tims who very likely had their own turbulence to handle.