Last week was Thanksgiving for the USA and while I don’t personally celebrate the holiday or the violent colonization it represents, it does encourage me to reflect back on some of the things I’m most thankful for. Once again, you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s people. Coworkers, friends, community members, industry professionals that I learn from and am inspired by every day. People that I’m lucky enough to collaborate with, which probably includes many of you reading this. People in my communities are what I’m thankful for.
Collaboration is one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months while getting this fun little venture off the ground. I think that most companies don’t prioritize collaboration as much as they should and I want to avoid that trap. And I’m definitely thinking about macro business decisions like why did Puppet, inc. invest so much time and resources into building an orchestration tool from scratch instead of integrating with one of the many existing options, even Ansible itself?
🔆 But even more, I’m thinking about micro level choices, because I think those are how you define yourself as a people and then that culture bubbles up into how your business runs, from top to bottom.
Many of you know that I’ve been involved in the roller derby world for a very long time. My partner has been a founding member of several teams and we are in the home of one of the premiere leagues in the world. One of the things that continues to draw me to the sport is their sense of community. The big dollars haven’t invaded yet and so they’re just there to have fun. They’ll beat each other up on the track and then share an afterparty. When a bout concludes, the audience will rush to circle the track because every single player will high-five every single fan who wants it. Then if you pay attention, there’s a ceremony in which the teams give gifts to each other and award several MVP awards to the other team. It’s worth pointing out that these awards don’t go to the player scoring the most points or other easily trackable stats. They almost always go to the players who are the best at holding their team together into a formidable force as observed by the people playing against them.
Recently, someone at Stanford who apparently knows very little about teamwork published a study that claimed to reveal that almost 10% of all software engineers were lazy and ineffective and didn’t contribute anything to the bottom line. Their rationale for this proclamation was they contributed few or no lines of code and the author deemed them “ghost engineers.” 🤨
A lot of people more qualified than I explained how LOC is maybe the least useful metric possible so I won’t go there. Instead, I want to look at it more holistically. This is a symptom of the bleed ‘em dry stack-ranking mentality that wants an easily measured metric so that toxic companies can reward those on top and punish those on the bottom in the misguided idea that it will improve performance and help the company hit revenue targets. Of course, trivially measured and manipulated metrics like this have nothing to do with the success of your company. If I have a choice between doing something to benefit the business or something that will get me a raise, what do you think I’m going to pick?
The other day, Mekka Okereke posted a sports metric
that I’d never heard of and it’s super intriguing. We’ve all heard of the stats
like points scored, number of rebounds or blocks or assists. But he talks about
a new metric that makes me think about those roller derby MVP awards. It’s
called the plus-minus and seems to be a simple comparison of how well your
team does when you’re on the court vs. how it does when you’re not playing. 🤯
Huh. I can see parallels in tech…. He goes on to say that
This resonates so much with me. I’ve always worked towards being this person, and I’ve always really valued others with this mindset. It’s a shame that it’s so rare, but again, tech companies rarely incentivize it.
But that brings me to the actual point of this ramble. The more we micro-optimize and track things like lines of code, or commits, or tickets closed, or time on the clock, or even story points, the more we lose track of the bigger shared company success goal. And the more we incentivize people to game the system. It’s easy to write more lines of code or chop up work into a million tickets and commits. It’s much harder to enable actual value.
I don’t know the answer. Not yet. And maybe I never will; this is a challenge people have been grappling with for ages and in a backwards sort of way, it’s why we have the terrible metrics we do today. But I do know that the answer is based on building a culture of shared team success rather than on myopically focusing on individual metrics. Because these “ghost engineers” are the biggest contributors to our actual success and it’s about damn time they get some MVP awards of their own. And recognition and compensation to match.