In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a manager on a Product team. I’ve been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanting to make my team accountable for performance.

   For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer.

   I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning.

   I’d like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career.

   Any thoughts on how to approach this?

2. A listener named Mike asks,

   I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice’ that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM’s before and think it’s dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it’s a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Greetings! I work at a research company with ~500 engineers and scientists. My company started promoting this new portal they setup that is like a private linkedin. You can fill up the profile they setup for you and apply for positions within the company. Why is my company doing this? They even offer meetings with Talent Acquisition team and they give you feed back on your resume etc. Thank you!

2. As someone who’s been a developer for a while, how can I ensure that I’m continually be exposed to and learning topics outside my purview? The further I get from school, the more laser-focused my knowledge seems to become. It’s easy to concentrate solely on my day-to-day tech stack and the architecture I work with, but how can I make sure I stay up to date with recent advancements in the field? Is there an RSS feed that I can stream directly into my frontal cortex to keep me up to date?

   Also, I understand this query may not be ‘soft’ enough, so if it must be cast into the void, banished to the land of unanswered questions – I accept my fate

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been a developer for about 1.5 years. I work for a large consultancy. we provide services to big clients. I’m working on a front-end codebase that has been through three consulting companies already.

   Tired of just moving tickets and fixing bugs, I decided to refactor the front end of the entire application we support. Touching the codebase to add features gave me a pit in my stomach. No integration tests, no staging environment, huge functions with tons of parameters, etc.

   The client provided technical guidelines that were pretty solid, but the code just didn’t follow them at all. In the time left on the contract, I refactored the codebase to fix the biggest problems to align with the client’s technical guidelines. I did all this without my manager/PO/PM asking me to.

   But now, how do I communicate what I’ve done to the client and my manager? Can I get any recognition for it?

2. A listener named Mike asks,

   I’ve been in my role for about 1.5 years in a dev team of 7. I really like the job, it has a good culture and I’m learning. Sometimes I channel my desire to learn into improving our projects with small, self directed changes on my own time. I these changes are useful but aren’t high enough priority to make it into planned sprint work. I don’t inundate the team with these requests, it happens maybe 1-2 times a month.

   We make a point of working in small steps, usually submitting several PRs per day each. I really like this approach, and I also keep my occasional self-directed bits of work small in scale. However, I’ve noticed these PRs receive more scrutiny and more “whataboutism” that our regular on-the-books PRs.

   For example, for regular sprint tickets there’s an understanding that we’re making progressive improvements or building small pieces of features that exist within the constraints of our systems. We might flag broader improvements to consider, but there’s no expectation to re-boil the ocean every time we want to merge code.

   When I submit a self initiated piece of work there can be a long back and forth of suggestions that can involve changing other dependent code, changing internal APIs which may have side- effects, and generally a level of defensiveness in the code that we never normally expect. I understand that by submitting off the books PRs I am requiring some work-time from reviewers, but there is more pushback than I’d expect. It feels like because I get the ball rolling on my own time the normal cost-benefit constraints go out the window, and the code purists come out to play.

   Could I be annoying the team with these submissions? Have you experienced team members doing the same thing? Is there a way I can scratch my own itch by learning against our systems without creating this resistance?