Of course anything can happen in the long run, but right now it sells products that millions of people love and is a public company that employs 1000s of people — that's already a pretty high bar to me!
It’s probably safe to assume the truth is mundane. Tesla stock is definitely overvalued (at least it was a few months ago. I haven’t checked recently) and the Tesla brand will likely just become a staple car brand (ala Honda, GM, Ford, Toyota, etc).
We tried to prioritize the backlog of small tasks against the rest of regular Sprint tasks, but we couldn't make it work very well (tried to write it in the post)
It's not that people skipped bugs entirely, but we found more success by setting up a fixed time every week
At the end the whole process is exactly what you said: a system to make sure the backlog is properly prioritized and managed, with developers assigning bugs to themselves and telling the rest of the company when they will address them
I agree about the risk. I think this is true for each system you put in place to give feedback on productivity — the difference between "healthy" and "patronizing" lies in good management
Many jobs have very precise performance metrics — just think of sales.
I believe metrics are not good or bad per se, it just depends how you use them.
Of course you may use numbers to treat developers like children. But you may use them also to understand problems and find ways to improve, individually or all together as a team.
I don't think the solution is not to measure things at all :)
I think the issue is not that someone's output is being measured it's that the chosen metric is not matching the devs own conception of the value that they bring to the table. For example management might start tracking LoC per Dev and this will lead to discontentment for all the correct reasons.
I think it all depends on how you approach it at a management level.
It might become a nightmare, with people burning out over this, or it might play out as a healthy way of tracking metrics on people's work to find ways of improving over time.
People should feel safe about the fact that they are not personally judged over this (or any metric about their work), that we are in this together and we use "points" to understand issues and how to improve together
Hi, author here! I think it's a risk you have if your company culture encourages working long hours. We never did that tbh and people know we don't have that expectation.
We also didn't couple strong incentives (e.g. money) with this process, we always kept it at a "fun" level. It's been more than enough to keep people engaged
You say that now but what about Mary dev who consistently pulls high effort tasks and does not finish them in the right timeframe because she goes home on time? When someone consistently shows up in the bottom of the chart because they work regular hours instead of overtime, it will be demotivating, cause your employees to resent those at the bottom for not working hard enough, and will creep into performance reviews.
I'm in the same boat as other posters, I am a hard no on this idea and would never subject my employees to it. When you build employee-facing metrics like this, you end up judging your employees by those metrics. Build smarter metrics.
ETA: "your company culture" is dictated by things like this. So the incentive it creates in your culture is to work longer hours so you can get to the top. This is literally building company culture, and trying to say you can avoid the negative incentive by having a better culture is missing the point.
I understand what you say — we never judged anyone on such metrics, but I agree I didn't do a great job at elaborating on that. Like you said, the metric is very simple, it's just an indication that is useful to understand bottlenecks, and to have some fun in a tight-knit startup team (that doesn't work long hours) where people don't like that much fixing bugs :)
Like others have said, I think the line between this being healthy and useful, and this becoming a nightmare is fine, and it gets probably harder the bigger the company is.
I think you need to be aware and selective in who "we" is here. Do you mean management-"we", peer-"we", personal-"I"? The post you're replying to did a great job of calling out that all of these (and more) could have very different viewpoints on this.
tl;dr: You have effectively instituted a grading rubric for your entire engineering team, the way a manager grades their worst engineers. As a result, your entire team is now motivated to act in accordance with the way bad engineers typically perform.
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I completely agree with the other responders.
At the BARE minimum, you could have changed this "leaderboard" to display only the top three, and coded the app in a way as to hide the remaining developers, as a way of celebrating the "best" developers this week, instead of ranking everyone on the team (and thereby punishing those on the bottom).
Your dev team is not a sales team.
If its your management team deciding task effort level, then you have compounding problems because they do not understand engineering impact. If it is your engineering team choosing engineering effort for each task, you still have created a perverse incentive.
If I implemented this sort of ranking on my team, BY FAR my best developers would consistently be on the bottom of the list. And this list, would in turn, motivate them to stop working on the hard ambiguous problems I need them to solve, and motivate them to steal as many items as possible that my junior engineers could otherwise have accomplished.
Even if my best engineers stuck to high-effort tasks (which they now are motivated not to do), not all high effort tasks are the same difficulty, and they now have a very strong incentive to only work on the easiest tasks in each difficulty level.
If I was on your development team, the introduction of this leadership board would be a Huge, Neon sign to me that code quality and engineering decision making no longer matters, all that matters for job security is writing as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
What's that? My poorly thought out code will result in numerous more bugs than if I had actually put thought into it to begin with? Well guess what? I'm the developer who best knows how to fix those bugs, so the more bugs I create now, the more I'll be able to fix next sprint too! Then I'll still be on top of the leaderboard!
Sure, you might have some internal processes to prevent this, but those are now on a timeline to deprecation as this leadership board comes to define your team culture. And even if your engineering team's internal culture is strong enough to overcome this blight, the game will simply become either how to best ignore this leadership board without upsetting management, or alternatively how to most act as described in the previous paragraph without getting caught.
This reeks of project management applied to engineering, without understanding the nuances of engineering.
Oh come on. Some comments from “italians” here are really disgusting. I’m Italian, live in Italy and run a startup here. I know A LOT of guys who run successful businesses here (not me, yet!), who don’t have to deal with mafia, corruption and mandolinos.
Is it harder here than in some other countries? For sure. Are there issues with taxes, regulations, etc? Hell yes.
BUT.
It’s not impossible to build great companies in Italy. And you will be amazed to discover there are upsides too. Technical talent is great (because universities are great, despite all the shit people usually throw at them), and REALLY cheap. Also, talent retention is easier: finding good, rewarding jobs is hard here, so if you build a great company, with a compelling vision, people just stay with you.
Quality of life MATTERS: good weather, food, having fun, have an incredible impact on how people work.
Finally, there are opportunities. Since Italy, as a market, is far behind in so many areas, there’s plenty of space for startups to innovate and build businesses that have already been proven successful in other countries/markets.
So, please, stop complaining. It’s hard everywhere. Somewhere it’s harder than somewhere else. But that’s it.
> It’s not impossible to build great companies in Italy
No, of course it isn't. But at the margin, it's more difficult, so if you have the chance, you should go elsewhere: I think Italy should get its own house a bit more in order before trying to attract people from other countries. They'll come naturally if Italy is a decent place to do business. It doesn't have to be perfect, because it has so many other nice things, it just has to suck less: California, for instance, is not the best US state to do business in, in terms of bureaucracy and taxation.
I _totally_ second this comment.
(disclaimer: I'm italian and I live and work in italy)
I agree that Italy has a big fiscal pressure, but aside from that, the issue with mafia and corruption that keeps appearing into this topic is misleading, it makes people think that once you have a startup, mafia will come to you, and that's absolutely not true.
I think there are only 2 main elements to keep in main when running a business in italy
1. Fiscal pressure
2. Bureaucracy
They are the only blocks people opening a startup here might really need to figure out how to handle.
You're an Italian, this is for people outside of Italy.
Culture makes a big difference. Starting a company in other places is easier, this is likely why Italy is resorting to something like this to try to bring in more startups.
Just because someone says the truths about the issues with Italian society, doesn't make them "disgusting". Reality can be harsh.
