I have an almost fight-or-flight response to someone mentioning lines of code a developer commits over a period of time as some kind of measure of their performance.
In my attempt to constantly improve my own human condition, I like to examine instincts like this to figure out where they're coming from. With all of the Twitter layoffs there's been plenty of mention of them in the news, and for some of us, I think certain metrics can actually provoke a trauma response.
I'd been mulling over that earlier this morning when I noticed this tweet from Tracy Chou:
[bracing myself to be yelled at]
just because there is not PERFECT signal in some data does not mean the is NO signal and that it’s completely useless
i am as suspect as anyone about using lines of code as a performance metric, but i wouldn’t argue that there is NO signal12:55 PM - 06 Nov 2022
She's not wrong, and she's also someone I know to be awesome when it comes to work done to make software development better for everyone, so why was my initial reaction to what she wrote dripping with anxiety?
It's the same anxiety I felt on many occasions when an inexperienced manager was using lines of code as a primary metric for renewing contracts; this led to a great deal of pain for me and my family. You can guess what happened, right? We associate benign things with terrible memories all the time, why should data be any different?
A competent manager would have looked at me and said "how is all that refactoring going?" after looking at how I was committing, and what I was working on.
In fact, this whole Twitter thing has really been triggering for a lot of people that worked tech in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We thought we'd gotten past harmful patterns that caused typically benign things - like random data taken out of context - to hurt us. It wasn't just lines of code, managers who never wrote code found all kinds of ways to make work miserable for anyone that still cared about what they did.
I think humans having time to heal from a few decades of very abusive employment practices is absolutely necessary, however inconvenient it may seem to billionaire chaos agents, and I hope the rest of the industry works to speak out.
It's not about lines of code, or even metrics - it's about patterns of abuse that developers were promised would finally be a thing of the past.
Just something to keep in mind: resentment is real, and irrational. And yes, reacting to responsible uses of that metric is acting out of bias, but it's also acting out of real hurt and for some, trauma.
My advice to myself is: don't get lost in what should or shouldn't be scary to people, it's better to just avoid things that trigger people. We're not going to have a shortage of people looking on in horror for a while, so it matters what we pay attention to. Please, remember and prioritize the human.
If nobody minds how it's used, then it's just benign data. Again, it's not about the data, it's about triggers that can be associated with certain unreasonable metrics.
Chaos agent billionaires are the reasons why we can't have nice things, and often simultaneously why we have them; the only way through it is to remember the human.
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