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elmuerte•

when sales teams have individual measurements and quotas to hit, as do recruitment teams in the number of positions to fill

But those performance measurements are also severely flawed. They only work towards personal gains (i.e. bonus), but not towards company benefit.

Sales are hires are made no matter what the impact to the business. Hire a shitty employ who destroys a team and leaves a year later? Doesn't matter, filled a position.

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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drawkbox•

Value creators are getting controlled by value extractors.

We need value creator consultancies that measure how much time McKinsey consultcult, Agile instead of agility, and all these derogatory terms like velocity, gold plating and blocker are doing to anyone wanting to put in effort to build things that are risky. Risk gets reward and innovation. That is going to cost you dearly now with all these metrics that will make you look like less of a contributor even though you might build a huge wave of revenue/innovation that is unquantifiable early on.

When will value creators strike back with the same bullshit they are using to whip us into pain cycles instead of gain cycles where developer freedom leads to new things, because it is worth the risk and is needed to compete. The first thing to go in these metric reports is R&D, very short term and very misguided.

I rate McKinsey consultcult a "needs work", "needs watching" and "needs oversight" to get them back in control. McKinsey, you got a 1/5 stars.

McKinsey and their elk ruined "agility" and made it a micromanagement cult "Agile". Anyone that capitalizes Agile they are lost in the cult.

Agile is a micromanagement cult, end of story.

One of the creators of the agile manifesto for software development stated this in 2015. It is like a McKinsey consulting consultcult level of "Agile" now that killed agility and they made it some sort of cult where if you don't follow and participate you are a "suppressive person", let alone does it actually get good things done. Better software is made in straight iterative processes that aren't so much about the cult level cadence.

Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas • GOTO 2015

Full of deathmarch Proof of Concepts or MVPs that went to production... with the whole "we'll improve it later" mentality that never comes because revenue is always the priority and sideways moves, like maintenance and refactoring or optimizing or removing technical debt, only happens when it become an emergency.

This is modern development, EDD, Emergency Driven Development usually called Agile but goes against all the agility rules in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. What McKinsey Agile did was take the worst part of the waterfall, the critical path, and make that every day. Iterative software development is needed, but the modern cult of Agile is actually bad fo software and creates shallow systems where everything was a two week hack job.

Agile was supposed to give developers more freedom to change and iterate, instead the sprints end up with hacks going to production because a KPI is met for features needed and creates messes that developers have no freedom or time to update.

Daily standups, shallow development based on 2-week cycles (started at month long), constant pressure leads to technical debt, people looking to better something are "gold plating", almost zero time to iterate on a design, was supposed to help prototyping but killed it, people actually doing deep dives that are innovative are in "spike sprints" and usually hit on "points". Better teams in the past had margin and were able to talk to others and try things without being a "blocker". All the terms are derogatory now.

The hamster wheel of "Agile" takes the external view of the product and those who deliver actual quality, and turns it to the people that play the internal game. It is office politics at the dev team level and it produces absolute bunk software.

This new type of consultant/McKinsey "Agile" came in like 2013ish when lots of authoritarian money made it into dev/software. So they needed a way to control the "resources".

Agile hits all the points on being a cult and a system of dogma:

  1. The only way to salvation is through your wallet -- all the tools/conferences/how to live right

  2. Agile Evangelism -- one true way

  3. Naming the “Other” -- outsiders are wrong and unworthy

  4. Maintaining control of your subjects -- micromanaging and stifling creative solutions

  5. Ritualistic meetings -- all the tchotchke flair

  6. No questions or critical thinking -- do not question the stories, external product or the process for you are a "suppressive person"

Metrics don't tell the full story and should only be a read, not the direction. Project management and customer needs or product needs should be the driver. We are at the point now where the KPIs have the wheel.

If they were just called metrics in most companies and not Key Performance Indicators (KPI), then they would get less focus. KPIs has been a heavy consultant pushed term but they are just metrics, they should never been seen as how to create value and develop a product.

People love to say "KPI" as much as "Agile" and "velocity" nowadays, both have been horribly twisted and ruin agility and value creation over value extraction. They need to be generic again... metrics, agility, delivery and usability.

When metrics are all you measure, you end up with problems

Innovation comes from play, the open mode, the closed mode is needed to ship but the closed mode is the default state in "Agile". Waterfall sucked because of the critical path and no ability to make change, every day is the critical path in the new "Agile" and just try to make changes without being called a "gold plating" or "blocker". Iterative development is better that has some margin to prototype and try a few iterations before having to ship, but you can't in Agile always on critical path.

Devs/designers need to push back, agile started as a way to give more margin of time and more control to devs/design but then it has turned into a cult against devs/designers meant to make everyone a cog.

Development of products will forever be a creative field, they try to to take that out of it and kill it. It would be like putting a dozen people on a novel or forcing creativity into a box, those things kill the innovation, creativity and the product. I have never seen good software made with "a-jee-lay" post 2010-2013 once the consultants got control of it.

The origin of agile was good, it was meant to give creators more time and margin to do things right. That has been co-opted into devs worrying about process over product, politics over product.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

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aliraza254•

As an engineering lead, I have found multiple shortcomings in generalized framework to measure developer productivity.

I have written a detailed analysis of the McKinsey report.

https://zerotoarchitect.substack.com/p/96f8292d-0f55-4127-bcba-83a9f1c39f60

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aliraza254•

I have written a newsletter post for developers and engineering managers to evaluate the performance and productivity of their resources by discussing how subjective and contextual it is.

​

https://zerotoarchitect.substack.com/p/how-to-measure-your-and-your-teams

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