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Bob Batcheler's avatar

I am generally HIGHLY resistant to paying for content subscriptions. It’s not that I am cheap; it’s just that I love / want so much variety in content that it can become extremely expensive. But, a week ago, I took a paid annual subscription to Kent Beck’s Substack because I have so much regard for his thinking and writing over the years. This two-part post is worth the entire year’s subscription! Thank you, Kent!

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Ashley Engelund's avatar

Changing the perspectives so that software development & delivery is viewed more as a series of exploratory attempts is a massive organizational culture shift and likewise means a radical change in perspective for most managers. [To be clear, it's a perspective I totally agree with.] The word "engineering" has for so long been synonymous with cut-and-dried, precisely measurable things. I suspect that word in "software engineering" is an obstacle in changing the perspective. I don't have an alternative and would love to hear ideas. Even if the alternatives are 'only' used to introduce and explain these issues to C-levels and managers, etc.

I've been along for this ride in software development ("engineering") since the late 80s, always with a strong interest in the very human side of things. (To the extent that I also majored in psychology.)

Humans and our systems (cultures, societies, communities) are what makes software development complex: the interactions, communications, and -- as these 2 posts show -- the very difficult realm of performance and rewards (which means some sort of measures) are, in my not-so-humble opinion, vastly more complex and difficult than any technical endeavor.

"You get what you measure" is such a fundamental mantra in science -- and especially psychology. But C-level folks and managers are most often measured on short-term metrics (e.g. quarterly stock value or profits) and so that is what they are incentivized to maximize. (Not to mention many don't know of or understand this fundamental concept.)

In reading this, I am struck by other areas where performance is also difficult. For example: measuring the performance of teachers in US public schools. (Teacher performance is affected by a large number of forces beyond their control, namely the capabilities of each individual student that happen to land in their classroom in any given year, the number of students they must teach, etc.) Or measuring the performance of individual health care workers (ex: nurses in a hospital ward).

Extreme examples abound of gaming the system because of ill-thought out rewards. Ex: The US bank Wells Fargo rewarded employees for opening new accounts. So some employees figured out how to open accounts for real people without their knowledge or consent. (And were ultimately discovered and sued in court.) In Georgia, teachers were rewarded based on standardized testing scores. Teachers altered student answers on tests in order to improve test scores. This scheme was uncovered and ultimately many were taken to court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Public_Schools_cheating_scandal

Those examples show just how much pressure there is to both come up with metrics and how often that leads to really awful metrics and thus awful incentives and awful results.

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[As a slight aside, I am curious if there are examples other than sports that can also be used as examples where there are metrics for individuals, individual contribution to team performance, _and_ overall team performance. Perhaps there aren't examples that would communicate the ideas so clearly. Perhaps there aren't examples that are so universally understood.]

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