I'm an Engineering Manager for a large company and have been for a number of years. For our large team we will rank the team based on perception of managers. After that we will then manually collate coding stats from all repos we work on. Unfortunately for the consensus view here and in the article, you get a 100% hit rate on who you think poor performers are and the lowest coding contributors.
For top performers it's more nuanced. In general they will be top of the contribution stats but sometimes if they're doing R&D or hard work then the stats are not very meaningful. But that's why we don't rely on them.
So metrics have their place to inform and color existing perception. But they will rarely change perception completely.
> Unfortunately for the consensus view here and in the article, you get a 100% hit rate on who you think poor performers are and the lowest coding contributors.
This is circular logic. If you measure that "coding contribution" nonsense, people's "performance" will be perceived based on that, _especially_ by their direct managers.
I’ve seen cases where folks completely checked out and were contributing nearly nothing, making no commits, writing no code, and faking it at standups. Simple metrics can help surface cases like this.
I agree that it’s something a manager could over-index on. I’m not sure how to avoid that beyond adopting a mindset of “this is noisy data that sometimes gives you important insights.”
> I’ve seen cases where folks completely checked out and were contributing nearly nothing, making no commits, writing no code, and faking it at standups. Simple metrics can help surface cases like this.
Of course we've all seen varying degrees of this - but these kind of people can only exist because of terrible management. Throwing metrics at the problem just introduces a more insidious version of this individual, one that knows how to game whatever metrics are used (managers especially will do this). I've been on teams where such an individual could thrive for years, even with promotions, and on teams where such an individual would be outed within a week.
In one of those cases I was the bad manager. The data was a wakeup call that made me understand the magnitude of the problem.
In another case, I knew the manager well, having been on his team before. He was effective, empathetic, and inspirational. He was also overworked and perhaps a bit naively assumed good intent from everyone. The data let me explain to him that the coworker was not contributing and he had a real problem.
You’re being paid to make your whole team as effective and capable as possible while satisfying your leadership and stakeholders. And to help your boss do that with his team by developing your peers. And…
Detecting slackers efficiently is simply never going to be a top priority. You have to trust your people. Usually it’s incredibly rewarding.
> “this is noisy data that sometimes gives you important insights.”
This is called "broken clock shows the right time twice a day."
Also c'mon, fooling commit metrics is silly easy, just _also_ one of the most burn-out and check-out inducing things ever. And at senior level you _HAVE_ to do that these days. You _have_ to inflate them.
JP Morgan Chase & Co | Lead Software Engineer | London, UK | ONSITE (hybrid)
I'm hiring for an experienced functional Scala developer to help us with intellectually challenging projects in the areas of metadata and model driven engineering. We build bespoke code generators, numerous codecs, data model authoring and storage platforms amongst other things. We're re-engineering our platforms from on-prem cloud to AWS next year.
We use a Typelevel stack. New services are typically written using Tapir/Http4s, Cats Effect and Doobie.
Within the bank we help run a functional programming interest group, we do Scala training and/or mob programming sessions weekly, many of the team frequent Scala meet ups in London.
Whilst we do work in feature teams where we have large deliverables, you will have to complete individual projects so you'll need to be comfortable working independently.
Some of the role requirements:
- Leads the engineering of cutting-edge solutions in the areas of metadata, data model authoring and storage, and data in place/data in motion
- Collaborates with our users, product management, architecture and stakeholders in our sister teams to ensure we build the right solutions
- Applied development experience in functional style Scala
- Experience working with asynchronous runtimes like Cats Effect
- Meta-programming through libraries such Shapeless or Magnolia
- Domain Specific Language design and interpretation
I'm fairly sure that's total comp - so with a 1st year bonus guarantee. After that first comp cycle, we all know which way the bonus will go...And then you're fighting the rest of the team for that 2-5% merit budget.
If that's just salary - I have no idea what Citi are doing, it's way out of market.
It's total comp. So salary plus bonus. It's high but I've seen higher at JPM in terms of total comp at VP level. If we're talking pure salary then yes £190k is base for a seasoned ED.
The author seems to think that people have infinite time. Many points require an allocation of time that most people - in particular those with families and caring responsibilities - do not have.
Remove bad actors? What if the bad actor is the mother/father of your kids? What if they're a parent who requires care you/they can't afford so you have to do it yourself?
It's all so simple isn't it. 10 steps to banality.
It could be rewritten as "have enough money to do what you want without being overly concerned about the consequences, because you can make the consequences someone else's problem with your money"
The author was from Belgium before he passed away five years ago from cancer. His perspective may be rooted in the Belgian experience where health care is affordable, there is a social safety net, and cheap access to mental health support.
If you live in a place where you must care for your parent because professional care is not affordable then perhaps look into organizing or supporting political will to make it affordable (4. Be part of bigger things). And if you live in the US where this political will is destroyed before conception, then I guess find another blog post to help guide you to happiness.
For what it's worth, Peter wrote this a little more than a year before he died due to metastatic cancer. I suspect he understood quite well that time is finite.
just replying to the part about bad actors - he is talking specifically about narcissists and psychopaths. If you have to cut out your parent because of some inconvenience (and not because they are narcissists and severely affect your life), then that makes you not so empathetic, and that is absolutely not what he argues for in his book psychopath code.
What you're talking about there is a Model Repository. We're building one at the bank I work at, except because our modelling language (or meta model) is based on OMG's MOF we can generate artifacts (code) from our models. You can't do that with TLA+ as far as I know. It's pretty powerful - you can compose models together very easily, as well as generate loads of useful things for data-in-motion.
Hey, thanks a lot for your response! It's really hard to search for abstract ideas like this if you don't know the terminology (like Model Repository), so this is super helpful. This is a very interesting topic for me, may I ask you a few questions? I sent you a request on LinkedIn.
This is such a naive and bourgeois argument isn't it? Free time is only valuable or meaningful if you have the means to make it so, and have been given opportunities to cultivate interests. If you're living in poverty, the quantity of disposable time will not make up for the lack of cash.
I think it shows the problems of trying to boil down things such as "what makes life worthy?" to a very simplified rule. I think if we look at other disciplines other than philosophy, like psychology to look at the things that give people a sense of well being, we get more nuanced answers that while influence the kinds of political systems we should have, don't dictate what exactly it should be.
There is definitely a trade-off between the two, though. There is a freedom in poverty (no assets to look after, no job to go to, no-one telling you what to do or who to be). I was definitely more miserable earning a good salary in a 9-5 job that I hated than when I was homeless and penniless.
The real problem is developers not understanding Object Oriented programming. Many developers write procedural style in Java or any other OO language. So you get God classes, methods that are hundreds or thousands of lines long etc - I'm sure we've all seen those horror shows. It's just a lack of education coupled with a culture where there is no strive for technical excellence.
You need high quality developers in Java, just as you do in any other language.
It seems like the article's beef is with OO programming, not Java per se.
For top performers it's more nuanced. In general they will be top of the contribution stats but sometimes if they're doing R&D or hard work then the stats are not very meaningful. But that's why we don't rely on them.
So metrics have their place to inform and color existing perception. But they will rarely change perception completely.