How to make your programmers (look like they) work harder
People need to show that they are working harder and be visibly stressed, for me to feel OK
Software is hard, you have heard. Also, people can be tricky, you have seen. Sometimes they come in late, or slack off when they should be working. They do the bare minimum and think they can escape the consequences.
Like this group of computer programmers you now manage, they come in late, wear jeans, and want to turn the lights down. And sometimes, they sit at their desks and talk about the most obscure things. TV shows that you would never admit that you like, or strange hobbies involving small parts or things that always break. Or maybe they are discussing work; it is hard to tell the difference.1 Other times they are just completely silent, staring off into space, making little notes on a piece of paper, or just typing away with those headphones on. Or they go on these walks, which they say are to clear their head, but they always return with coffee.
You have this suspicion that they could be working harder because their demeanor is that of someone working their first job. They don’t seem to take anything seriously. When there is a severe production incident, money, which is what your bonus is made up of, is wasted, and customers are unhappy. If enough of them get unhappy, you can lose your job. And they could lose theirs.
You want them to take things more seriously, like when that bug that they said was “really nasty” caused those financial statements to be wrong. You got berated by customers for hours and apologized for it, even though you barely understood how it happened.
When you asked the engineering manager for an explanation, one of the senior engineers came into your office and explained it, drawing all over your whiteboard without asking. They seemed happy about it, showing visible excitement about how attractive a problem it was. Like it was one of their little hobbies and they were talking about a fun weekend. When they left, your whiteboard reminded you of what cop find in the killer’s apartment. They even said something about how it wasn’t really fixed and something about debt and how it wasn’t on the roadmap.
This situation isn’t tenable; you need to turn the screws on these slackers and make them work. When you asked him whose fault the bug was, the senior engineer didn’t give you a straight answer but instead got sort of serious and thought about it for a while, then sent you some sort of medical document that you couldn’t understand - it was like they were interviewing themselves! All that behavior to you shows that they aren’t doing all that they could, and they know it.
Things have to change.
Turn up the Monitoring, Turn up the Pressure
Starting this quarter, you have decided that you are going to start tracking some key metrics. The obvious stuff, really:
Open bugs
Closed bugs per week
How fast bugs are closed
How many lines of code are checked in by each developer
How many PRs are approved by each developer, and how fa
You laid out metrics that you want to hit for these numbers. You said that this performance tracking was so that you could see who was behind and ahead, and directly communicated that this information would be tied to their compensation and future employment. In addition, you have set a meeting in which all the current bugs are to be presented and explained to you in person so that you make them answer for their mistakes with the person who wrote the bug. You have heard that this works well based on you watching and barely understanding the HBO TV show “The Wire”.
The Bright Future
The morning after announcing these new rules, you see them assembled in one large group rather than individual standups. They are all standing around a whiteboard, likely the only exercise some of them get unless you count bending over to paint those figurines some of them have on their desks. They seem more serious; like they are gripped by something. They seem so engaged now; at the top of the whiteboard, you see the Bug schedule and PR approval bot, so clearly, they are planning how to improve.
You can’t wait to see the first set of numbers next week and how much it changes things around here. They are going to work harder now, you feel.
Kafka, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, Kotlin: what are these, fantasy characters? I heard one of them say that they just finished their “my sequel dump”, but HR said it wasn’t what I thought it was.