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The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.

We were working for a well-known software consultancy at a Big Bank that decided to introduce individual performance metrics, “for appraisal and personal development purposes”. This was after some considered discussion from the department manager, who knew you shouldn’t measure things like lines of code or bugs found, because people can easily game these. In the end we kept Tim, and we quietly dropped the individual productivity metrics in favour of team accountability, where we tracked—and celebrated—the business impact we were delivering to the organisation as a high-performing unit.

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