Measuring Engineering Productivity, at Google, circa 2020 - “If the decider doesn’t believe the form of the result in principle, there is again no point in measuring the process.” // Some great advice in here about improvement programs. Come up with metrics and needs from the (economic/strategic) stakeholder who has the power to make changes. Ask them what metrics they care about and study those. Otherwise they won’t care about the results.
Links and strange finds from the World Wide Web
Hello there!
Wastebook“I spent my early childhood in a 15-minute city. It was called the 1950s.” Here.
“a cybercriminal selling data from these breaches told its researchers that they had been able to compromise a Snowflake employee’s ServiceNow account using credentials stolen via infostealer malware, bypassing SSO provider OKTA.” // Security in 2024. What a bowl of dropped pasta. Here.
Money is real: “Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people.
Developer Experience: What not to do - In summary: don’t be enterprise software. Less crass: be easy/instant to install and run, and have good docs that explain how to do [I’d say 2 to 3 example apps/uses]. Even better: be a SaaS, at least have that as an option. All of this advice is pretty difficult for a full on, private cloud platform to do. You can’t just “install a cloud” in a few minutes and mess around with it. Let alone, like, multi-region, etc. I think. Maybe someone could figure it out? That would actually be a good sign: if your platform is easy to install for demo’ing, it will probably be easy to install for reals.
How to Evaluate Video Performance in Developer Relations - The answer: track CTAs.
Developer Productivity Metrics at Top Tech Companies - Good stuff! Lots of emphasis on happiness/satisfaction. These are all from tech companies, though: no tradition enterprise responses (right?). Yes, and: what would it look like if you surveyed the top three organizations in manufacturing, banking, pharmaceuticals, and tax ministries?
Zoom CEO envisions AI deepfakes attending meetings in your place - AIs “are terrible tools for delegating decision making to. That’s currently my red line for using them: any time someone outsources actual decision making authority to an opaque random number generator is a recipe for disaster."
Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope - Building your own (Kubernetes) platform takes a long time: “61% of respondents indicated that at least one of their platforms is custom-built, the journey from concept to implementation is far from smooth. Alarmingly, 41% of these organizations took more than a year to develop a minimum viable product."
9 Questions to Help You Figure Out Why You’re Burned Out - This is concise and good. Yes, and: what to do? How do you determine when you are “too good” of a worker, sacrificing yourself for the good of the company without proper compensation? “Too good” here means that you yield a high profit to the company. What is the proper profit? What are the morals of the company (which is, really, just people) taking too high? The employee? Should you quit a six figure job because you’re burned out? Then you have the stress of falling from the middle, especially when you’re older and need a high wage: see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling.
Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped RTO would make staff quit - Also, people on the office feel the need to “look busy."
How to build a successful agile development culture – and why your business needs one - An overview of agile development I co-wrote. The most distinct thing about the Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs) methodology is following XP. The second most distinct thing is balanced teams. The third: actually following the practices.