Valuing Glue & Eyes Up
6 Jun 2019
What matters can’t be measured, and what does get measured doesn’t matter
This is my favorite aphorism. There are so many important things that need doing to deliver value to users. Commits don’t matter, especially when they’re the wrong commits!
It is an unfortunate trend to try and capture productivity levels of engineers. Lots of companies are trying very hard to create a new Fordist movement for knowledge workers. It’s not going to work (not currently anyway).
More and more of engineers time these days is required to be spent on non-coding activities. Make sure your organizations recognize your effort here. Make sure they reward your effort. Push to get those on your career ladder/promotion evaluations.
The purely head-down programmer who isn’t looking at the broader picture is not going to be very successful going forward. There is too much to learn—one person cannot know it all. Things are changing too quickly. And users are becoming more sophisticated, and demanding.
The tech industry is healthier when people are buying their software. Not our current VC-funded where the users are the product and engineers live in silos separated from the population. But in order to get back to a place where people buy software we have to have our eyes up.
It is my opinion that if an engineer is unable to value the efforts of other engineers to “be the glue that keeps projects going”, there is no way they’re going to be able to value their users and look them in the eye.