

Do software developers deserve better incentives and rewards? - kuhnster

In many positions it is relatively easy to create incentives and performance rewards based on outcome based metrics.<p>However, we have yet to find an objective and useful metric for our development team.<p>What do you think works? Please share your ideas.
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chrisbennet
How about "If we ship on time, everyone will get a raise to match market!"

Seriously though, good developers _want_ to perform their best. You want to
make developers happy? Let them ship code they are proud of. They are not
idiots, letting them take Friday afternoon off to "reward" them for working on
the weekend is kind of insulting.

Consider this: Are "productivity" metrics like hours in the office, lines of
code, # bugs fixed, etc. something that actually helps ship code or are they
done so managers have something to put in their spreadsheets?

Do managers think that developers can somehow tricked into being more
productive?

I've been lucky to have great managers. They acted more like "target
designators" [you know, the laser that guides bombs to the target] and less
like commanders.

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canadaj
I'm not sure I have a good answer to your question, but I remember reading
somewhere a little story about a developer on a team whose net lines of code
written (total written - total removed) was always at a negative or small
value. This would imply laziness or perhaps just deleting comments or garbage,
but interestingly enough, the developer was refactoring large chunks of code.

Maybe a fun little metric/competition could be "Fewest net lines of code
written while maintaining full/greater functionality"

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kuhnster
Really interesting. We have debated lines of code type metrics. There's no
easy answer that isn't merely superficial. I would love some heavy hitter
hackers to weigh in with more thoughts.

