The post is about a question someone posed to Majors about can you really measure the productivity of software engineers or other similar professions. The questioner is under pressure to use metrics to quantify performance, but the questioner is skeptical this is practical or worthwhile.

Majors opens up with an anecdote about working a job where the main metric of doing work was closed tickets. Accordingly, Majors explains, she heavily optimized for closing tickets instead of actually doing meaningful work. She says her boss loved her, but she was incredibly bored.

She strongly feels you cannot measure the productivity of creative professionals, jobs that can be reduced to metrics can be automated away, and that this is dehumanizing and degrading for the people being measured.

Instead she says leaders should focus on the overall health and performance of the team because the team owns the code, not individual members. She lists these qualities for running high performing teams:
\

1. Outcome-based management that practices focusing on impact, plus
2. Team level health metrics, combined with
3. Engineering ladder and regular lightweight reviews, and
4. Managers who are well calibrated across the org, and encouraged to interrogate their own biases openly & with curiosity.

While I haven’t been on a team like this, I think she is correct. I believe focusing on outcomes over effort is the correct practice since effort doesn’t mean anything if the outcomes you produce are meaningless or counterproductive. I also think having a clear career ladder and regular reviews helps keep team members on track. Finally, I feel managers must be engaged and open to be successful for their teams.

Majors puts a good deal of responsibility on managers. She says they must be technical so they can properly assess individual contributions to the team’s success. Even though Majors says teams should not have individual metrics, she says managers must be able to make qualitative judgements about team members. She does say that while this kind of management is more challenging it does produce more rewarding relationships, outcomes, and work for managers and team members.

I appreciate her perspective on this. I do feel a heavy focus on individual metrics can lead to a focus on outputs instead of outcomes, like Majors described in her anecdote. Sure, she was closing tons of tickets, but was she actually making a positive difference by doing so? I think this is where you can run into bloated code if you make, for example, lines of code written your measure. I believe folks will optimize for the measure regardless of the outcomes they produce.