Comment by bob1029
1 month ago
> What you want is measuring business outcomes but those are hard to attribute to a particular developer.
I think we could solve this by eliminating some middle tiers and putting the developers on the actual customer calls every week. Each senior developer owns at least one customer. That sort of thing.
It's a completely different ball game when you are a developer on some B2B/SaaS and you are answering directly to the customer regarding your work. There's no one to hide behind - your teammates are now aside you and can only render supplemental aid. Once you have developers answering directly to the customers, you have a simple, ~boolean, qualitative metric that virtually any manager/investor can get behind: Is the customer happy?
If the developers are keeping the customers happy, then they are performing. If the customer is unhappy, then there is a performance issue. Whether or not most or all of it can be attributed to blockers on the customer's side is irrelevant at the senior levels of play. Developers should be helping the customers get unblocked. Offer meetings & screen share time. Generally, make yourself as available as possible. If you do this correctly, the customer is likely to take note and provide you with some amount of cover (i.e., not be in a raging fit when they call your CEO).
There is no reality in which you can inject more middle management or process to get developers to take more accountability. The only thing that works is to get them out of the bullshit matrix and in front of the customers. They need to experience how it feels to work directly with a happy customer and then realize how important it is to keep them that way.
This path also happens to solve a whole host of other maladies in technology business, most notably shiny rabbit chases. When you have the fear of god in you regarding the client, you aren't going to be as inclined to play in traffic with a NuSQL engine on their watch.
lol no, I have worked with companies that do that. Many developers have very specific personality types, and they also think in technical terms rather than customer terms. It isn’t a bad thing, it is why they are good at what they do.
The most successful companies I have worked with have a good product manager that can take customer input and work with a technical manager to balance priorities/effort. The technical manager consults the team before making decisions (such as SCRUM meetings if using that)
Issues come into play when folks start distrusting developers. When we say it will take 4 weeks or 8 weeks to implement something, there is a reason for that. We know the code. We know how much of a PITA it is to work with, and we aren’t being misleading. On the flip side, we have been trained to give conservative estimates thanks to crap management and unexpected pitfalls, so we try to understand promise and over deliver. If management could recognize this, everyone would be happy, provided they recognize that 8-week timeline is fine and they don’t promise something different to the client and trust devs to do their thing.
EDIT: Managers also tend to forget that we aren't a machine in a factory. We have good days, bad days, and everything in between. We excel with using our brains, however our brains suffer from anything between lack of sleep, depression, and other nonsense due to just plain having a bad day. I feel like it is more noticeable with us because we rely on our brains so much more than other folks in other professions do. Shoot, even random noise in an office, whether working at home or at an office, can hurt productivity.
Now I have myself missing dev work. Hoping to go back soon. Currently unemployed.
Farming would be extremely effective if the crops would be plowed down into the ground when they're ripe, instead of bothering with all the work of harvesting, refining, packaging and distributing to customers.
But fortunately, software developers are not involved in architecting farming.
What I'm saying is that developing for developments sake is completely pointless. The purpose of software is to help in the real world. And every developer should understand that connection, no matter how shy or antisocial.