Chris Slowe Reddit Engineering Performance Management

Talking about management and engineering. I was talking with the CIO of Atlassian. You're familiar with them, right?

Yep.

And we were talking about engineering performance management. And this concept like sales has metrics and they look at like they're very metric driven now. Right. With the softwares, marketing is very metric driven with cost to acquire things. And then they were looking for like where are the metrics in engineering? And I came across this company, this whole, this like new category, sort of like an emerging category called like engineering performance management. Have you heard about this yet?

I've seen some companies that are getting into this. Like I think the ones that come to mind are usually like tools that write on top of GitHub or tools that write on top of like, you know, Slack and try to do a little bit of like, I don't, I can't not say the word creepily, you know, kind of keep track of like everything that's going on and figure out where there's inefficiencies in the process. But I'm curious to hear some of the ones you've seen.

Yeah, so I had this guy on my show from, he did Accelerator like previously, remember that company? And now he's doing this thing called Pinpoint and very, very cool. Him and his co founder have had this like amazing relationship for the past 19 years which is like really cool. Like to do multiple companies with the Same person over 19 years is really interesting because we're always talking about trust and co founders and so I was like this is a picture perfect relationship. So I was actually interested like after we spoke and so I was like, hey, let's see what it actually does. After the interview he gave me one of his co founder and then he did a product demo with me so.

I could see it.

Dude, it is so like this stuff is really cool. I can't even describe all of it. I'm not even going to try. But all I'm saying is that that category of software is definitely something that I believe is going to. There's going to be like a hundred of those companies right? Right now I think there's only like a handful, but I believe in the next three or four years gonna be like a hundred of them.

You know, it's something that, it's something that I definitely struggle with or at least as an org we struggle with a little bit because you know, it is a little bit harder to define engineering productivity if only from the standpoint of like I think what's underestimated for engineering work is that it is ultimately a creative endeavor. Right. Like you can't just say like work harder or ship more lines of code or like have a straightforward. You know, there's an old, I mean there's an old story about I always forget, I'm terrible with names in general and I'm going to butcher this story, but I'll give it anyway. There's a story about how like early on, I believe it was Apple used to measure productivity just by straight up like lines shift. Right. It was like a very, and you know, it's like very early in their, in their career as like a company. And they hired this guy who knew, let's say he knew what he was doing, he's very good at his job and his first commit was a negative 10,000 line plus 200 line commit. And it was just this demonstration of like, oh, actually, okay, so this guy just actually has therefore negative productivity by our measurement, even though effectively made this thing faster and more efficient. And so I think that the one way we're trying to actually solve some of this is we're just looking at sort of things like almost developer happiness is the first thing to touch. Right. Like do developers themselves feel that they're being productive or are they being bottlenecked on things? So you know, good old fashioned survey of like name things that you were stuck on or like where do you think we could do have improvements? And that at least has helped with facilitating starting to find like yeah, we know that, we know that our developer setup is not optimal right now. Right. But also identifying that. Oh yeah, it's actually really easy for a developer to break the build on our developer virtual machine and then find out like, okay, so if a developer breaks the build, that means every engineer in the company has to spend an hour like fixing their broken builds. Well, that's a lot of times wasted when you average, when you add up, you know, that's an entire engineer month at our scale.

Yeah.

And that only gets worse. And so being cognizant of that, that kind of level for us I think is the starting point.