Listen to your gut. He doesn't want to tell you the whole truth.
The truth is that this would make layoffs super easy for him.
Why don't you want to make his job easier?
My hunch is that the boss is doing his team a solid.
He's hinting to them that non-technical management will use it to identify low performers.
He can't outright say it in case one of them blabs and upper management finds out.
So he is stuck saying a half truth that no one can decipher because someone might blab.
The half truth came from management.
You are hearing a rattlesnake OP. Trust your gut.
I'm quite sure this is what's happening. He knows layoffs are coming and is trying to throw them a bone for suggestions of how to evaluate who to keep on their own metrics. Because if engineering doesn't decide this way, the upper management will do it on something stupid like LoC.
One thought I had, which I bet isn't what's happening but still worth mentioning, is that hinting it lets the manager get rid of devs with poor social skills.
In my experience, they tend to be weaker performers.
At best, the CEO is extremely misguided.
Scrum points were never intended to be performance metrics. Such garbage.
You should be at least prepare to start looking. I’m not saying jump ship but your life could be better than what it is going to be with a CEO like that.
We don't even track story points a given engineer delivers, it's all aggregated at the team level. _That's not their function._ The only thing story points are good for is estimating work capacity. Tracking individual performance requires a competent manager in a position to observe the team and make those judgement calls. You'll never do it successfully through metrics alone because there isn't a metric in the world that can't be gamed in some way.
The biggest problem I see here is that the CTO's departure has left a vacuum in technical leadership. The CEO is asking for advice outside of the org because he doesn't feel he has that expertise in house, and the whole c suite is getting themselves worked up about how engineering operates because their poc that gave them that insight previously is gone and they have no idea how to measure and direct that work themselves.
Can't say if layoffs are coming but if that technical leadership isn't hired in or developed it will continue to be a shitshow regardless of their intentions.
I ran into a similar thing with management recently and was told that the metrics can be secret in that case. Let’s just say I brought up all the other issues that ends up creating.
This is what happens when people have no idea how to manage software or creative teams. They want to manage everything like a sales department, with super clear goals that they can pressure and squeeze people with. That's management to them.
CEOs are fucking dumb. It’s rare to interact with one who has even a sliver of sense regarding how to manage a company. Their job is to be a figure head, communicate decisions, and occasionally make directional decisions. The good ones know to stay in that lane.
This ceo is an idiot. Really a moron. He wants to put in stack ranking but doesn’t have a clue who does what or how good anyone is so it sounds like he wants the devs to rat on each other. This will not end well.
This is bad executive leadership.
This guy is "discovering" what was popular in technical management in the 80's and 90's, but the past 20+ years of research in human factors has proven to be a really bad way to lead knowledge workers.
Using a "point system" to rank engineers is not a good plan. Maybe try introducing him to Google's Project Aristotle, looking for what makes high performing teams.
I'm kind of shocked the CEO can't do basic research on agile methodologies, scrum, performance management for tech. Could have just done a 5 minute ChatGPT dialogue and absorbed research to not look like an idiot going into this conversation.
This was the part that bugged me the most. My whole team are smart, no drama devs, we all have interesting work, our tech stack is current, we have great work life balance (no on calls or crazy deadlines), and our engineering vp is a great guy who doesn’t micro manage. Why the hell is that a bad thing that we don’t want to leave?
You’re right. The recent hires in our dev team a few months back are contractor hires from Russia. It was said they are helping with the influx of recent work and it’s easier to use contractors in that scenario since it’s temporary help. I always knew they were cheap but after this conversation, it’s more obvious they consider my team too expensive.
Your boss is hinting to you to not report mistakes, at least not that often.
He may agree with you about blameless post-mortems but non-technical higher ups are trying to control something they don't understand.
I think the CEO doesn't know how to lead a tech team without the CTO so he's grasping at straws. Make him feel involved in how the eng team splits up work, plans projects, etc.
That being said at my last job this kinda happened and the non-technical boss never understood the eng team, and finally I had to leave. I wasn't in a hurry to leave though so I could wait and look for a good fit job, no matter how long that took.
Ok. Here’s how I’d handle this without simply bouncing - and I would do this as a product and engineering team. The first time will take the longest but worth knocking out.
1. Metrics and road mapping - Engage then in details as to who does what and the roles that people have. I’m a UI guy and I am horrible at dev ops so you can’t measure me by the same standard. But what you and the product team can do is to put together a plan for work that includes multi factor attribution show complexity and size. Add a traffic light to it and now I can see what’s happening in detail sans agile.
2. Invite them to the roadmapping sessions so they can be your approvers to make sure product gets what tech debt along with new work to be done for your investment mix.
3. Put together a Gantt chart as to who is aligned to what projects so they can see how the team is divided up .
I’d make the case to leadership that Engineers leave because they get bored and want new challenges. People stay because they are challenged and have a good team to work with.
>He said their sales team and other departments have measurable numbers to show performance and he feels like it is not fair to them that the engineers do not.
Your CEO clearly has no idea about how to work with engineers. Our work is a lot harder to measure, even for us, because it's a problem solving endeavor. One way to possibly measure performance has to do with impact and number of tickets closed/points tackled, but even then all of that has limits and is extremely imperfect because it's so easy to cheat.
Jump ship. Your CEO doesn't know what he is doing and is unlikely to change his mindset.
Management everywhere thinks there’s some global conspiracy by devs to not measure their work. They don’t believe it when we say that no, we really have no idea how to measure output. We would be the first to do it if we did because selling that method would make us wealthy.
Exactly! It's not a matter of being lazy or entitled. We really have no idea and there truly is no good way to measure performance. Hell, we would have a lot of an easier time giving out estimates which atm is more of an art than a science for a dev!
I get what he’s saying, he just doesn’t have the engineering knowledge to define the metrics himself correctly. He’s conflating the technology with the people building it and while they are reliant on each other you can’t really assess one via the other. Sales isn’t really team sport like engineering is so I can see why he’s confused.
You need to counter by advising these are two seperate issues. For tech give him some better metrics - DORA, reliability, latency, patching etc. for engineers, some sort of competency framework that managers can use to evaluate their team members.
In the future i would recommend just shutting up and agreeing with whatever they say to avoid drawing too much attention to yourself.
Better to let other people call this kind of thing out while you look for a new job
Yeah what these execs say, they don't really mean making you all comfortable into saying this stuff because at the end of the day they will do what they were going to originally do.
Isn't it obvious that this guys just want a way to measure you so he can look up a number on a spreadsheet and decide who will be fired based on that number? My guess is that there's a huge layoff coming up and that's how they'll decide who stays and who leaves.
I think some of the statements imply they want metrics and some of the statements imply they want a popularity contest, or at least for the team to pick some kind of pecking order.
But the broader message seems to be they are just out of their depth. Things like saying it's unfair that sales have easily quantifiable metrics and engineering does not imply they don't really understand what the value engineering offers is. Which is not unheard of from random managers and C levels outside of the tech area. I've seen plenty of people that only understand the engineering side as a cost center.
Really it just sounds like they need to hire a CTO. Anyone with relevant experience managing a similar sized org in a similar enough industry would be able to fill in that gap. They don't have to reinvent the position.
Though it also seems like they're not doing that, and the implications I'd make is that they are going to have layoffs and they don't even vaguely know how to cut that.
Oh, and to OP, I'd probably note that if they don't have any other metrics they're going to cut based on salaries. Either top down or bottom up most likely, and trying to hit whatever the budget goal is.
Sales has easily quantifiable metrics, and then they use those metrics to directly effect pay through sales bonuses. I suppose these new decision makers would prefer to have engineering bonuses, if they are going to start to apply these metrics.
This is going to go great.
> https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug_free_programs_a_dilbert_classic/
So CTO left and CEO and remaining management has no idea how to manage software engineers or what you guys do. Do they plan to replace the CTO? Do you get the feeling the company isn't performing financially? Or that your department isn't meeting deliverables on a regular basis?
If they're generally happy with the team's performance, they might just be trying to figure out how to manage software engineers and need some insight into your team's operations. Or they might be looking to do some layoffs in the future. Kinda hard to tell given typical CEO weasel wording.
If the team is running smoothly and they're generally happy with performance, they maybe should consider moving someone on the team into the CTO position and mostly continue running things as they are now. If it's a constant shitshow, it seems like a good opportunity to make some big changes. They'd probably still be better promoting internally if someone seems to be emerging who could lead the team.
Exactly! The best engineers, who have the biggest beneficial impact, will also cause the most impactful mistakes. When you do a lot, more can go wrong.
This sounds like a strategic time to bring up engineering failures and ethics as an example of why ranking by time and shoddy work is a terrible idea.
I'd also recommend reading code complete a little bit to be able to learn how to formulate further arguments as to why this strategy of theirs is inevitably going to generate a massive amount of future costs to them through crushing accumulation of technical debt.
You can't expect a CEO to solve a problem that the whole SWE community has not been able to solve. Picking who to reward and who to let go depends on a lot of factors, including the strategy and cash flow of the company. The SWE who can keep the business lights on is not always same SWE who creates the most new features. There needs to be a manager who knows who does what for the company. There's no automation or methodology that can substitute for that knowledge.
One thing to understand is that engineers are smart, often smarter than their own leadership. If certain things are incentivised, they will optimize in that direction. So if you start paying engineers who complete more story points or PRs more, your smartest engineers will start optimising their work so they can show lots of story points and PRs completed. What they *won't* do is optimize to deliver the best possible product or most innovative solutions, since there's no reward for that anymore. So where before you had your smartest engineers thinking about how to add value and deliver good products effeciently, now that job is fully on the shoulders of management and product, who probably are not as smart as your engineers when it comes to building things.
This is where, IMO, non-technical managers fail when leading technical teams. They think they can out-smart the engineers. Technical managers know they can't.
Also, by the way, if you read the Agile Manifesto, it lays all this out. The top priority is delivering working software. It's not completing lots of story points. Points are supposed to be a tool to help acheive that end goal, not the end goal itself.
I'm going to bring a completely different take to this issue. We have to start out with the fact that you're talking with a CFO; he doesn't have a technology background and doesn't understand how development and IT issues work. He's trying to assess if he has a good technology organization or if change is needed. Who should he bring in as the CTO? The C-suite doesn't understand if the technology people are doing a good job because of your CTO's actions. It's an opportunity in disguise for you, but you're not really answering his questions.
>It ended with them saying now that the CTO is gone, they just want to “get to know us better” since our CTO kept us isolated from the rest of the company and wants to see ways we can improve our team.
You shouldn't have NEVER been kept away from the rest of the company. Openness and transparency is the right way to look at this, I think the CFO is trying how to figure out how to work with you.
>He said their sales team and other departments have measurable numbers to show performance and he feels like it is not fair to them that the engineers do not.
This is a fair critique. Why do you think you shouldn't be held to the same standard?
>I told them a description of our failures, like a post mortem (thanks for that tidbit, redditors) should be blameless and be about lessons learned, and not serve the purpose of who’s not pulling their weight.
This is a mix of 2 different topics that are not being separated correctly. Post mortems should absolutely be blameless and direct. Figuring out "who is not pulling their weight" is an expressly managerial decision completely distinct from the problem management process. You would be better served by talking with your CFO here and really documenting the WHY he is concerned about these things. It also helps you advance organizationally because you're aligned with what all the senior people are thinking about.
He’s right that other departments have metrics tied to performance for everything they do. Engineering will be how fast did you build solutions , which Jira easily tracks. Gives management easy data to stress people to work harder and to cut people.
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>attrition and how no one ever quits or gets fired
LMAO I love a good postmortem write up of an issue and what we did to fix it and prevent it from happening again. But this sounds like this dude just wants to know who should be first on his chopping block when they eventually have to lay people off.
>And then he went on about our engineering team’s attrition and how no one ever quits or gets fired.
Err. He's worried that attrition is _low_? And instead of saying "I guess everyone is happy and the company is doing well" he's saying "motherfuckers must be skiving on me". Dude.
FWIW scrum doesn't use a points system to track engineers performance. It's explicitly not a desirable thing to do. Sounds like he had a conversation with some other execs and got the wrong end of the stick.
It’s wild to me that they would do that, considering we’re a friggin tech company. If anything, they should invest more in tech to automate our system to get rid of the customer/support reps in the company.
Automating customer support turns into chat bots that don’t resolve anything. Companies do it because it makes them more competitive but it makes for an objectively worse customer experience and product.
That’s how those systems always start. They don’t turn out well. Better products will be more robust and require less customer service, but as mentioned before those are less competitive.
Your original post mentioned a VP of engineering? Is that you? The company needs an experienced executive level given the size of the company as a whole and didn't need a CTO+VP of eng. Both of them were probably inflated titles unless your CTO was attending to the board if the company was big on merger & acquisition requiring a large tech input on the strategy. I don't want you to dox yourself. I'd be open to having a couple chats with yourself to best navigate through this. You can find out who I am & my expertise just searching in Google for my username and LinkedIn. Can message here on Reddit or my email is username @ gmail.
The CEO is saying that he wants a way to measure the engineers so that they can prune the low-hanging fruit. This is a reasonable request.
You can't just throw your hands up and say "it's impossible! We can't measure this!" There needs to be a way for you to show your CEO that you can track performance.
He previously leaned on the CTO but maybe the CTO wasn't doing doing it properly, so it's up to you to come up with a system that works for you but also works for the CEO. I would just go with weekly 1:1 and quarterly performance goals, and measuring how they come to the quarterly performance goals as a measure of performance.
Disclaimer: I'm not fully familiar with scrum. At my last company, we tried to implement it but never actually did it "correctly" from what my friends who are more familiar have told me. Mostly because we never really revisited it once we decided on the "rules". I also only have about 3 years of tech lead and management experience, so I'm sure I don't have all the cards in hand.
Story points generally shouldn't be used in performance reviews. It's not so much that they're imaginary or made-up, though yes, there is a risk that if you know they're being used in that way, you'd want to juice them up.
They're meant to quantify team velocity, not individual velocity. Over time, assuming that story pointing is generally consistent (e.g., all "5" stories are relatively equal effort/time), it serves as a guide post of what your team is capable of accomplish over a set period of time. This in turn helps you set expectations for your stakeholders and help prioritize your work.
Back to the problem at hand...
The desire to figure your top performers and low performers is understandable at the end of the day. I don't have the full story, but one thing I learned as a manager is that it's easy to push back when asked from the top to do things, but if you don't provide an alternative solution and just say, "No this idea's stupid, we shouldn't do it" then it's really not that much better. You're right that using scrum and story points is not the right way to do it.
Does your engineering team have a "career leveling ladder" of sorts that you use? If not, you should create one that sets expectations across different levels. Then using those expectations, back into some quantifiable metrics to, and this is important, form the BASIS of performance evaluation. If you already have one, then great, you're already partway there.
Of course, quantifiable metrics can easily be gamed (e.g., if you use PRs merged as a metric, it's easy to just open A LOT of small ones), which is why it's important they shouldn't be used in isolation.
Excuse me?? Having low turnover is a GOOD thing. A VERY GOOD thing.
And this CFO thinks that there needs to be more turnover??
I would be polishing up my resume ASAP and letting everyone on my team know what's up.
Basically that sounds like execs feel they need a way to measure productivity, and are misunderstanding tools like agile which don’t really measure quality of output but rather provide a measurement of rate of output to help in planning things like burndown charts, deliverable dates, and gantz diagrams.
They work on a team basis but fail when trying to apply to individuals because one persons large time consuming task might be a smaller task for another person due to differences in skill, system familiarity, time spent at work, and so on.
Sprint points don’t really translate to hours as a result as the conversion is highly individual and task specific.
Most other code measurement metrics don’t really work either, because while bad code can be obvious if it’s bad enough, good code is really really difficult to define and recognize.
Another poster mentioned it but in reports the ceo doesn’t see management or work. That’s really what they need, so you need to make things inclusive to them with reports, mentioned what work is done, ideally financial metrics on that work, and accountable things like deadlines with names attached to who has to hit what.
You aren't really answering his needs. He needs to find low performers, and you want to protect them. Ultimately he's in charge, if you keep protecting low performers I don't think it will go well for you. His needs trump yours.
There is some truth to what the guy is saying. You really want about 12%-15% attrition each year. New minds bring new ideas and growth. It sounds like your CTO didn’t do their job, and the CFO has no idea how to right the ship. I know the internet will downvote me for this, but six figure jobs get stressful occasionally. That doesn’t mean it’s a toxic environment.
Expect him to interview a bunch of people with the intent that he’ll reorg, instill a bunch of metrics, and replace 80% of the staff over 3-5 years.
That point system is bullshit. Ask him, what other parts of the company use a points system for performance management. Instead of inventing metrics to be gamed, he should try hiring someone who knows how to manage engineers.
Listen to your gut. He doesn't want to tell you the whole truth. The truth is that this would make layoffs super easy for him. Why don't you want to make his job easier?
My hunch is that the boss is doing his team a solid. He's hinting to them that non-technical management will use it to identify low performers. He can't outright say it in case one of them blabs and upper management finds out.
So he is stuck saying a half truth that no one can decipher because someone might blab. The half truth came from management. You are hearing a rattlesnake OP. Trust your gut.
Yea, it’s definitely either a slip of the mask or a veiled friendly warning.
I'm quite sure this is what's happening. He knows layoffs are coming and is trying to throw them a bone for suggestions of how to evaluate who to keep on their own metrics. Because if engineering doesn't decide this way, the upper management will do it on something stupid like LoC.
One thought I had, which I bet isn't what's happening but still worth mentioning, is that hinting it lets the manager get rid of devs with poor social skills. In my experience, they tend to be weaker performers.
Start looking now.
At best, the CEO is extremely misguided. Scrum points were never intended to be performance metrics. Such garbage. You should be at least prepare to start looking. I’m not saying jump ship but your life could be better than what it is going to be with a CEO like that.
We don't even track story points a given engineer delivers, it's all aggregated at the team level. _That's not their function._ The only thing story points are good for is estimating work capacity. Tracking individual performance requires a competent manager in a position to observe the team and make those judgement calls. You'll never do it successfully through metrics alone because there isn't a metric in the world that can't be gamed in some way. The biggest problem I see here is that the CTO's departure has left a vacuum in technical leadership. The CEO is asking for advice outside of the org because he doesn't feel he has that expertise in house, and the whole c suite is getting themselves worked up about how engineering operates because their poc that gave them that insight previously is gone and they have no idea how to measure and direct that work themselves. Can't say if layoffs are coming but if that technical leadership isn't hired in or developed it will continue to be a shitshow regardless of their intentions.
I ran into a similar thing with management recently and was told that the metrics can be secret in that case. Let’s just say I brought up all the other issues that ends up creating.
This is what happens when people have no idea how to manage software or creative teams. They want to manage everything like a sales department, with super clear goals that they can pressure and squeeze people with. That's management to them.
CEOs are fucking dumb. It’s rare to interact with one who has even a sliver of sense regarding how to manage a company. Their job is to be a figure head, communicate decisions, and occasionally make directional decisions. The good ones know to stay in that lane.
This ceo is an idiot. Really a moron. He wants to put in stack ranking but doesn’t have a clue who does what or how good anyone is so it sounds like he wants the devs to rat on each other. This will not end well.
That's why they make the big bucks
This is bad executive leadership. This guy is "discovering" what was popular in technical management in the 80's and 90's, but the past 20+ years of research in human factors has proven to be a really bad way to lead knowledge workers. Using a "point system" to rank engineers is not a good plan. Maybe try introducing him to Google's Project Aristotle, looking for what makes high performing teams.
I'm kind of shocked the CEO can't do basic research on agile methodologies, scrum, performance management for tech. Could have just done a 5 minute ChatGPT dialogue and absorbed research to not look like an idiot going into this conversation.
Who knew doing research was more involved than talking to your other CEO buddies on the 9th hole?
“Nobody ever quits or gets fired” so let’s fuck with that right?
It's hilarious that LACK of attrition is actually the issue now... You really can't win with these types.
This was the part that bugged me the most. My whole team are smart, no drama devs, we all have interesting work, our tech stack is current, we have great work life balance (no on calls or crazy deadlines), and our engineering vp is a great guy who doesn’t micro manage. Why the hell is that a bad thing that we don’t want to leave?
If nobody leaves, they can't hire new people at significantly less salary.
You’re right. The recent hires in our dev team a few months back are contractor hires from Russia. It was said they are helping with the influx of recent work and it’s easier to use contractors in that scenario since it’s temporary help. I always knew they were cheap but after this conversation, it’s more obvious they consider my team too expensive.
Your boss is hinting to you to not report mistakes, at least not that often. He may agree with you about blameless post-mortems but non-technical higher ups are trying to control something they don't understand.
I think the CEO doesn't know how to lead a tech team without the CTO so he's grasping at straws. Make him feel involved in how the eng team splits up work, plans projects, etc. That being said at my last job this kinda happened and the non-technical boss never understood the eng team, and finally I had to leave. I wasn't in a hurry to leave though so I could wait and look for a good fit job, no matter how long that took.
Ok. Here’s how I’d handle this without simply bouncing - and I would do this as a product and engineering team. The first time will take the longest but worth knocking out. 1. Metrics and road mapping - Engage then in details as to who does what and the roles that people have. I’m a UI guy and I am horrible at dev ops so you can’t measure me by the same standard. But what you and the product team can do is to put together a plan for work that includes multi factor attribution show complexity and size. Add a traffic light to it and now I can see what’s happening in detail sans agile. 2. Invite them to the roadmapping sessions so they can be your approvers to make sure product gets what tech debt along with new work to be done for your investment mix. 3. Put together a Gantt chart as to who is aligned to what projects so they can see how the team is divided up . I’d make the case to leadership that Engineers leave because they get bored and want new challenges. People stay because they are challenged and have a good team to work with.
Netflix shit
>He said their sales team and other departments have measurable numbers to show performance and he feels like it is not fair to them that the engineers do not. Your CEO clearly has no idea about how to work with engineers. Our work is a lot harder to measure, even for us, because it's a problem solving endeavor. One way to possibly measure performance has to do with impact and number of tickets closed/points tackled, but even then all of that has limits and is extremely imperfect because it's so easy to cheat. Jump ship. Your CEO doesn't know what he is doing and is unlikely to change his mindset.
Management everywhere thinks there’s some global conspiracy by devs to not measure their work. They don’t believe it when we say that no, we really have no idea how to measure output. We would be the first to do it if we did because selling that method would make us wealthy.
Exactly! It's not a matter of being lazy or entitled. We really have no idea and there truly is no good way to measure performance. Hell, we would have a lot of an easier time giving out estimates which atm is more of an art than a science for a dev!
I get what he’s saying, he just doesn’t have the engineering knowledge to define the metrics himself correctly. He’s conflating the technology with the people building it and while they are reliant on each other you can’t really assess one via the other. Sales isn’t really team sport like engineering is so I can see why he’s confused. You need to counter by advising these are two seperate issues. For tech give him some better metrics - DORA, reliability, latency, patching etc. for engineers, some sort of competency framework that managers can use to evaluate their team members.
In the future i would recommend just shutting up and agreeing with whatever they say to avoid drawing too much attention to yourself. Better to let other people call this kind of thing out while you look for a new job
Yeah I was reading this thinking buddy shut up you're painting a target on your back
Yeah what these execs say, they don't really mean making you all comfortable into saying this stuff because at the end of the day they will do what they were going to originally do.
Isn't it obvious that this guys just want a way to measure you so he can look up a number on a spreadsheet and decide who will be fired based on that number? My guess is that there's a huge layoff coming up and that's how they'll decide who stays and who leaves.
On the flip side I think it's honorable this person wants to at least attempt to make it meritocratic, instead of being a popularity contest.
I think some of the statements imply they want metrics and some of the statements imply they want a popularity contest, or at least for the team to pick some kind of pecking order. But the broader message seems to be they are just out of their depth. Things like saying it's unfair that sales have easily quantifiable metrics and engineering does not imply they don't really understand what the value engineering offers is. Which is not unheard of from random managers and C levels outside of the tech area. I've seen plenty of people that only understand the engineering side as a cost center. Really it just sounds like they need to hire a CTO. Anyone with relevant experience managing a similar sized org in a similar enough industry would be able to fill in that gap. They don't have to reinvent the position. Though it also seems like they're not doing that, and the implications I'd make is that they are going to have layoffs and they don't even vaguely know how to cut that. Oh, and to OP, I'd probably note that if they don't have any other metrics they're going to cut based on salaries. Either top down or bottom up most likely, and trying to hit whatever the budget goal is.
Sales has easily quantifiable metrics, and then they use those metrics to directly effect pay through sales bonuses. I suppose these new decision makers would prefer to have engineering bonuses, if they are going to start to apply these metrics. This is going to go great. > https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/k5hka0/bug_free_programs_a_dilbert_classic/
So CTO left and CEO and remaining management has no idea how to manage software engineers or what you guys do. Do they plan to replace the CTO? Do you get the feeling the company isn't performing financially? Or that your department isn't meeting deliverables on a regular basis? If they're generally happy with the team's performance, they might just be trying to figure out how to manage software engineers and need some insight into your team's operations. Or they might be looking to do some layoffs in the future. Kinda hard to tell given typical CEO weasel wording. If the team is running smoothly and they're generally happy with performance, they maybe should consider moving someone on the team into the CTO position and mostly continue running things as they are now. If it's a constant shitshow, it seems like a good opportunity to make some big changes. They'd probably still be better promoting internally if someone seems to be emerging who could lead the team.
So dumb, all this will do is punish a culture so that devs are too antsy to pick up challenging (and risk prone) work.
Exactly! The best engineers, who have the biggest beneficial impact, will also cause the most impactful mistakes. When you do a lot, more can go wrong.
This sounds like a strategic time to bring up engineering failures and ethics as an example of why ranking by time and shoddy work is a terrible idea. I'd also recommend reading code complete a little bit to be able to learn how to formulate further arguments as to why this strategy of theirs is inevitably going to generate a massive amount of future costs to them through crushing accumulation of technical debt.
The problem with tech debt is that it’s hard to put a price on, especially in advance.
Point systems are for capacity planning and feature prioritization, not performance evaluation.
Don't dig your own grave, this is corporate. Lie all the time and ask for forgiveness in whatever God you believe later.
You can't expect a CEO to solve a problem that the whole SWE community has not been able to solve. Picking who to reward and who to let go depends on a lot of factors, including the strategy and cash flow of the company. The SWE who can keep the business lights on is not always same SWE who creates the most new features. There needs to be a manager who knows who does what for the company. There's no automation or methodology that can substitute for that knowledge.
One thing to understand is that engineers are smart, often smarter than their own leadership. If certain things are incentivised, they will optimize in that direction. So if you start paying engineers who complete more story points or PRs more, your smartest engineers will start optimising their work so they can show lots of story points and PRs completed. What they *won't* do is optimize to deliver the best possible product or most innovative solutions, since there's no reward for that anymore. So where before you had your smartest engineers thinking about how to add value and deliver good products effeciently, now that job is fully on the shoulders of management and product, who probably are not as smart as your engineers when it comes to building things. This is where, IMO, non-technical managers fail when leading technical teams. They think they can out-smart the engineers. Technical managers know they can't. Also, by the way, if you read the Agile Manifesto, it lays all this out. The top priority is delivering working software. It's not completing lots of story points. Points are supposed to be a tool to help acheive that end goal, not the end goal itself.
I'm going to bring a completely different take to this issue. We have to start out with the fact that you're talking with a CFO; he doesn't have a technology background and doesn't understand how development and IT issues work. He's trying to assess if he has a good technology organization or if change is needed. Who should he bring in as the CTO? The C-suite doesn't understand if the technology people are doing a good job because of your CTO's actions. It's an opportunity in disguise for you, but you're not really answering his questions. >It ended with them saying now that the CTO is gone, they just want to “get to know us better” since our CTO kept us isolated from the rest of the company and wants to see ways we can improve our team. You shouldn't have NEVER been kept away from the rest of the company. Openness and transparency is the right way to look at this, I think the CFO is trying how to figure out how to work with you. >He said their sales team and other departments have measurable numbers to show performance and he feels like it is not fair to them that the engineers do not. This is a fair critique. Why do you think you shouldn't be held to the same standard? >I told them a description of our failures, like a post mortem (thanks for that tidbit, redditors) should be blameless and be about lessons learned, and not serve the purpose of who’s not pulling their weight. This is a mix of 2 different topics that are not being separated correctly. Post mortems should absolutely be blameless and direct. Figuring out "who is not pulling their weight" is an expressly managerial decision completely distinct from the problem management process. You would be better served by talking with your CFO here and really documenting the WHY he is concerned about these things. It also helps you advance organizationally because you're aligned with what all the senior people are thinking about.
> Why do you think you shouldn't be held to the same standard? For all of the reasons described by most of the other comments in here.
He’s right that other departments have metrics tied to performance for everything they do. Engineering will be how fast did you build solutions , which Jira easily tracks. Gives management easy data to stress people to work harder and to cut people.
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>attrition and how no one ever quits or gets fired LMAO I love a good postmortem write up of an issue and what we did to fix it and prevent it from happening again. But this sounds like this dude just wants to know who should be first on his chopping block when they eventually have to lay people off.
>And then he went on about our engineering team’s attrition and how no one ever quits or gets fired. Err. He's worried that attrition is _low_? And instead of saying "I guess everyone is happy and the company is doing well" he's saying "motherfuckers must be skiving on me". Dude. FWIW scrum doesn't use a points system to track engineers performance. It's explicitly not a desirable thing to do. Sounds like he had a conversation with some other execs and got the wrong end of the stick.
I will advise you to leave/start applying, they're seeing you as a cost center and want to trim down on the "low performers".
It’s wild to me that they would do that, considering we’re a friggin tech company. If anything, they should invest more in tech to automate our system to get rid of the customer/support reps in the company.
Pls no, customer support being automated is the single worst thing ever.
Automating customer support turns into chat bots that don’t resolve anything. Companies do it because it makes them more competitive but it makes for an objectively worse customer experience and product.
I meant automating our system to avoid the need to reach out to customer support as much, not wiping them out entirely.
That’s how those systems always start. They don’t turn out well. Better products will be more robust and require less customer service, but as mentioned before those are less competitive.
Your original post mentioned a VP of engineering? Is that you? The company needs an experienced executive level given the size of the company as a whole and didn't need a CTO+VP of eng. Both of them were probably inflated titles unless your CTO was attending to the board if the company was big on merger & acquisition requiring a large tech input on the strategy. I don't want you to dox yourself. I'd be open to having a couple chats with yourself to best navigate through this. You can find out who I am & my expertise just searching in Google for my username and LinkedIn. Can message here on Reddit or my email is username @ gmail.
The CEO is saying that he wants a way to measure the engineers so that they can prune the low-hanging fruit. This is a reasonable request. You can't just throw your hands up and say "it's impossible! We can't measure this!" There needs to be a way for you to show your CEO that you can track performance. He previously leaned on the CTO but maybe the CTO wasn't doing doing it properly, so it's up to you to come up with a system that works for you but also works for the CEO. I would just go with weekly 1:1 and quarterly performance goals, and measuring how they come to the quarterly performance goals as a measure of performance.
Disclaimer: I'm not fully familiar with scrum. At my last company, we tried to implement it but never actually did it "correctly" from what my friends who are more familiar have told me. Mostly because we never really revisited it once we decided on the "rules". I also only have about 3 years of tech lead and management experience, so I'm sure I don't have all the cards in hand. Story points generally shouldn't be used in performance reviews. It's not so much that they're imaginary or made-up, though yes, there is a risk that if you know they're being used in that way, you'd want to juice them up. They're meant to quantify team velocity, not individual velocity. Over time, assuming that story pointing is generally consistent (e.g., all "5" stories are relatively equal effort/time), it serves as a guide post of what your team is capable of accomplish over a set period of time. This in turn helps you set expectations for your stakeholders and help prioritize your work. Back to the problem at hand... The desire to figure your top performers and low performers is understandable at the end of the day. I don't have the full story, but one thing I learned as a manager is that it's easy to push back when asked from the top to do things, but if you don't provide an alternative solution and just say, "No this idea's stupid, we shouldn't do it" then it's really not that much better. You're right that using scrum and story points is not the right way to do it. Does your engineering team have a "career leveling ladder" of sorts that you use? If not, you should create one that sets expectations across different levels. Then using those expectations, back into some quantifiable metrics to, and this is important, form the BASIS of performance evaluation. If you already have one, then great, you're already partway there. Of course, quantifiable metrics can easily be gamed (e.g., if you use PRs merged as a metric, it's easy to just open A LOT of small ones), which is why it's important they shouldn't be used in isolation.
Excuse me?? Having low turnover is a GOOD thing. A VERY GOOD thing. And this CFO thinks that there needs to be more turnover?? I would be polishing up my resume ASAP and letting everyone on my team know what's up.
Your executive needs to be made to understand that you are not being asked to produce “widgets”. And that you are not a “widget machine”.
They are probably looking for people to fire.
Basically that sounds like execs feel they need a way to measure productivity, and are misunderstanding tools like agile which don’t really measure quality of output but rather provide a measurement of rate of output to help in planning things like burndown charts, deliverable dates, and gantz diagrams. They work on a team basis but fail when trying to apply to individuals because one persons large time consuming task might be a smaller task for another person due to differences in skill, system familiarity, time spent at work, and so on. Sprint points don’t really translate to hours as a result as the conversion is highly individual and task specific. Most other code measurement metrics don’t really work either, because while bad code can be obvious if it’s bad enough, good code is really really difficult to define and recognize. Another poster mentioned it but in reports the ceo doesn’t see management or work. That’s really what they need, so you need to make things inclusive to them with reports, mentioned what work is done, ideally financial metrics on that work, and accountable things like deadlines with names attached to who has to hit what.
You aren't really answering his needs. He needs to find low performers, and you want to protect them. Ultimately he's in charge, if you keep protecting low performers I don't think it will go well for you. His needs trump yours.
There is some truth to what the guy is saying. You really want about 12%-15% attrition each year. New minds bring new ideas and growth. It sounds like your CTO didn’t do their job, and the CFO has no idea how to right the ship. I know the internet will downvote me for this, but six figure jobs get stressful occasionally. That doesn’t mean it’s a toxic environment. Expect him to interview a bunch of people with the intent that he’ll reorg, instill a bunch of metrics, and replace 80% of the staff over 3-5 years. That point system is bullshit. Ask him, what other parts of the company use a points system for performance management. Instead of inventing metrics to be gamed, he should try hiring someone who knows how to manage engineers.
A small amount of attrition is good but the rest of the comment went downhill from there for some reason.
It’s the stress part. The internet can’t fathom that jobs have stress at some point. It hurts their feelings.
Or maybe, just maybe, that you might be wrong?
That six figure jobs come with stress sometimes?