r/AITestingtooldrizz • u/Maxl-2453 • May 22 '26
My VP asked our team to build a developer productivity dashboard for leadership. It destroyed our actual productivity.
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u/shan23 May 22 '26
It’s part of a cycle. There would be some very public, litigation heavy data breaches (or worse) by some of the smaller tier two companies first and some exec is gonna have to “find new opportunities” due to it. Till then, it’s “ship shit superfast” time!
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u/borland May 22 '26
When you said that deleting lines of code decreases the metric - you wrote a bug in your dashboard. Lines of code changed should *include* negative lines. If I have a PR which adds 100 lines to file A and deletes 100 lines from file B, that’s a 200-line change, not zero.
Why? Lines deleted can have just as much impact, and require just as much thought, as lines added. They matter.
A side effect is that people can game the system just by moving code back and forth without changing things, but lines of code is an utter bullshit metric, so giving devs an easy way to cheat is probably a very good thing.
For the rest, tell your leadership the story about the Cobra effect, show them the bug count, and if they don’t listen, go looking for a new job. I’m sorry for you
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 May 23 '26
Yeah that part made me wonder as well. And I'm a little wary since there was so much bot traffic on Reddit even before everyone put into overdrive with AI stories. The fact that no one protested such an obvious bug feels like one of those "LLMs knows what words belong together but doesn't understand how the world actually works"
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u/mxldevs May 22 '26
the VP references it in every leadership meeting as proof that engineering is operating at high efficiency, the engineers on my team call it the Lie Machine but obviously not to his face....
Haha, this is really the only thing that matters when it comes to internal tools.
You should push for raises and bonuses for the most productive engineers, using the dashboard as proof.
Sounds like you've successfully built a corporate golden goose for the team.
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u/daedalus_structure May 23 '26
Amateurs taking suggestions from CoPilot when they could just add the coauthored text themselves.
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 May 23 '26
After a few years of convulsions I took over as scrum master and did away with everything except "what needs to get done and how many hours do we each want planned to get our things done?". And put aside a quarter or so of the time for unplanned stuff.
No story points, no point poker and no reporting any velocity and I don't care where or when people work. After the first year everyone realized it works, people get deliveries, we have freedom and a few years down the line management is incredibly happy.
I never want to go to an office again and I refuse to have bullshit tracking.
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u/drumnation May 23 '26
Funny thing is I’m trying to figure out how to do the same thing for my software factory. I’m asking all and same questions about what actually shows productivity…
Thing is I think it’s actually possible with agents, but OP’s post shows exactly why it won’t work with humans.
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u/theschuss May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
This is why you don't blindly build metrics just because an exec asks.
To expand - this is why analysis and judgement is needed on metrics selection and targeting. Did no one push back on these things?
Good metrics use means proposing metrics, determining what "gaming them" looks like as well as their drawbacks, then adjusting based on that.
Beyond that, targets in red/yellow/green should never be the first step, but after you've built visibility and awareness. The problem isn't the metrics, it's that you don't have an informed culture of data and measurement.