Comment by lbriner
21 hours ago
Developers don't like being measured for good and bad reasons. The good reason is that there is lots of effort that we expend that isn't always captured in metrics like long pieces of design or training others etc. The bad is that we don't being told that we aren't as productive as other people even if we are!
My experience is that these are only useful over a long enough period and across enough people that we can spot genuine outliers. For example, your average across the last 6 months is "15" and the average of everyone else is "25", can you help me see whether you are being given too much off-target work or are there any other issues that are blocking you getting stuff done?
Also trying to reduce productivity to some thing as silly as pull requests per hour etc ignores valuable contributions else where. Design, push back, quality, mentoring, leadership. I thought that is why meta had the "coding machine archetype" and other archetypes, recognising that just PRs aren't the only measurements.
And if you start measuring amount of commits or PR's I'd bet money on there suddenly being smaller PR's and more commits. As soon as the metric is tied to peoples livelihood, it will be gamed.
Funny anecdote: I had a large company selling their LLM tools with a slideshow starting with a mention of Goodhart's Law, and then proudly present number of PR's as a metric in the next slide.
From my limited experience with this tool / DORA metrics, it's not so much about performance (PRs per hour) but more about whether you can act fast if you need to. But I'm not sure what the other metrics are about.