Comment by Sesse__
4 days ago
It's a signal. It's not a strong signal, and you certainly should not base your entire perf on it, but if the number is unusually high or low, it's a signal that could warrant further investigation.
(I once worked with an engineer that had two PRs, both fairly small bug fixes, in a given calendar year, and when I looked more carefully, they did not have any other obvious output or impact.)
Strongly agreed. It is a signal. I did an analysis once at the end of the year. Work group of about 45 engineers. The CM system had a lot of steps, and work could get bounced around, but there was a step where some one "resolved" a software activity. Bug fix or new requirements, it did not matter. This step was when someone actually completed work and put into into the dev stream.
A quick DB query and the variance was substantial. A couple of people had over a hundred. About 10 had 2. For the year. The ramp up was slow, average was 8 to 10 a year.
Dig a little deeper. Those at the top were 'group leads' not only did they do IC work, they also got stuck with all 'paperwork' on the problem work packages. They had 'power', so they could override various things. So, they were doing a lot of work, and taking care of things. Good signal, matches what one would expect.
Those at the bottom. One of them had effectively been a 'systems engineer'; all of their time was working on requirements with the customer, making powerpoint, etc. Important work, so that signal was inverse of what it originally showed.
A couple were in the middle that had great reputations for technical expertise. They were spending almost full time in training / mentoring / very hard problems mode. Highly valuable, but not shown by looking at these numbers.
All the rest? 80% of the work was being done by 20% of the people. We could have dropped about 12 heads and barely noticed.
The problem is, you could not take action on this measure. It gave you a place to start, but you needed to know more about what was going on day to day.
Let's measure "executive performance" by counting how many "answered phone calls" per hour they have. If they don't answer enough calls, that's a signal, that they aren't doing anything useful, and should be depreciated as a result.