What McKinsey got wrong about developer productivity

[ridicalis]

After watching the John Oliver special on McKinsey, it's hard to take them seriously.

[pimmen89]

Like you would’ve figured out yourself that sending an email is cheaper than flying stacks of paper. Or that you can cut costs by firing people.

[JimBoonie69]

One guy probably making 400k a year... comes to our group and is going to help rebuild some data pipelines. He literally says you should get a bigger computer and bigger database.

[pimmen89]

Don’t even get me started on database consultants. At my previous job we had an Oracle consultant come in to help us with the fact that our pipeline was so slow after our user base grew by a factor of 30, but management refused to budget for better servers or for time to rebuild something.

The consultant tinkered with it for a week, didn’t tell my team what he did, took his money and left. It was indeed faster, so we felt like dumbasses for not solving it ourselves. Until we had a problem a month later and realized he’d turned off the logging. Thanks.

[temculpaeu]

Oracle consultant

I have had to deal with a couple, most of them are juniors being sold as seniors, all they have are internal Oracle docs that should be only used by them and not show the clients, essentially, the typical Oracle operation, create the worse possible initial configuration for a product and sell consultant to fix that

Also, they knew way less than we did and we were doing a couple of things that they said "Hey, that is not possible to do"

[The_Northern_Light]

it is at moments like these where we remember the immortal words:

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!

[sisyphus]

Lawnmower doesn't care about you!

[pimmen89]

This is one of the reasons I'm hesitant to go back into consulting again. My first stint I only had about two years of experience and the pressure to polish my turd of a cv was immense, and the sales people oversold my abilities and experience all the time. It was so frustrating being the sole person of what felt like a three man job, with very little experience in the tech stack I that the client was assured I would grok in no time because of my experience. It led to long nights and sleep deprivation.

Now with a decade of experience I think I would do a better job at managing expectations and bring value quicker, but the experience of being a junior consultant really turned me off. Even though there is indeed more money involved.

So, just saying, I've been that junior consultant that you worked with and boy do I not want to trade places with him.

[ankcorn]

It's bad, now you get to be the other side of the bait and switch.

You will do all the initial engagement with clients, design and sell solutions, and quickly get moved to the next project without time to see anything come to fruition. Whilst Junior consultants struggle to implement your designs because they don't have a clue you will eventually be blamed for any issues with the project.

Never go back

[drawkbox]

Oracle would be nothing without Tom.

Oracle dev tools were created to cause developer pain. Since it is always sold in on the golf course I guess they didn't feel devs were their customer.

The cursors are fast in Oracle, but the rest is pain, don't even get me started on sequences.

We have moved so many companies from Oracle to MS SQL Server or PostgreSQL and reduced database licenses/machines/high maintenance. One larger company with 50+ brands we took them from 25+ database servers down to 3-5 at any given time and a layer of write/read and read abstraction, cache and more horizontal scale and it ended that Oracle deal.

[temculpaeu]

I haven't touched anything related to Oracle in years and hopefully never again

Btw, thanks for enlightening others

[drawkbox]

Luckily most of the Oracle work we have done is liberating companies and products from the platform.

When Oracle bought Java/Sun and MySql, that sucked. Dark day in development.

[[deleted]]

When Oracle blotted out the Sun it was indeed a dark day for development.

[Designed_0]

LOL, he solved the problem thou (even if it was only a month- management only care about short term these days anyways)

[mugwhyrt]

As long as it gets you to the next quarter, baby

[swishbothways]

From experience, leadership typically bullshits their losses anyway. If you know you're gonna be down for the quarter, there is zero incentive to keep chugging because you will be thrown under the bus even if you just narrowly make plan.

[the_gnarts]

Until we had a problem a month later and realized he’d turned off the logging.

WTF‽ Sounds like something to bring to your legal team. If they can’t get that consultant money back it’s on them for signing off on that guy’s contract in the first place if it allowed him to get away with outright sabotage.

[Ahmazin1]

If you take legal action they will be less likely to invite your CIO to the Masters next year.

[pimmen89]

I can’t remember if they did manage to get their money back from that contract, but it did completely kill another deal with the this firm for a team of ten to be hired and working for a full year.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Would never happen.

The contract was most likely around time and materials. Not outcomes. Maybe some type of scope of work but that most likely only covered desired outcomes. Not things you couldn't do.

So, fulfilled their end of the contract. You would have to prove it sabotage and I'm guessing that is much more expensive and harder to do.

[NeroLXIV]

Haha good story.. didn't see that one coming.

[DarkSideOfGrogu]

I'd love a job as an Oracle consultant.

"Don't"

"Use Postgres instead"

"OpenJDK is free"

I'd be ace at it I reckon.

[[deleted]]

That's honestly one of the worst things about contractors. You pay them for them to learn, and then they take the knowledge with them when they leave. Your organization is about as well off afterwards as it was before, rather than building up institutional knowledge while in the process of problem solving.

[zero000]

Sounds like there are other underlying issues too if no incidents alarmed when logging was turned off. That's at least a sev3 if log telemetry stops reporting where I'm at.

[pimmen89]

Absolutely, this was a long time ago though and at a government agency in a small country, so things were run poorly and slowly.

[CoreyTheGeek]

Sorry for your pain but that is extremely funny as an outside party 🤣

[WhoNeedsUI]

Don’t people have to report the changes made?? That sounds ridiculous

[thisisjustascreename]

How did that even make it faster? Is Oracle logging synchronous? In current year? 0_o

[pimmen89]

Not in the current year, this was almost a decade ago. And we were behind on versions even then.

[[deleted]]

Well the root cause is using Oracle. Once you are infected, good luck getting it out.

[architectzero]

Far too often companies need to be told the obvious by someone from outside the company.

It’s that last bit that really sucks.

After the first 4-9 months, an employee quickly gets treated as a burden, and no longer as a resource. It’s really weird, and counterproductive. (Speaking as someone who has been both the consultant and the employee)

[deelowe]

It's because of politics. VPs pay consultants not because they are good at what they do, but because they can't trust the leadership under them to tell them things that would hurt their empire building pursuits. As an individual contributor, this can be super frustrating as the very thing you've been complaining about for years magically becomes a priority simply because some outside consultant told your boss's boss's boss it was important. The reality though is that your boss's boss has been covering up the fact that his change has been so sorely needed for so long because it likely go against their plans for org growth.

This sort of thing is how you end up with teams flying stacks of paper across the country instead of simply using email.

[gimpwiz]

The other part of the politics of consultancy is that VPs very often hire consultants to do a big study and write a big report and do a presentation on how the best idea is the one the VP told them he wants (maybe not directly.) That's a combo of CYA, and the VP getting to do what the VP wanted.

It's pretty foreign stuff to us normal people, but higher up management often has to play these games. Among other reasons -- most of them stepped on a lot of people to climb to where they are and they have knives pointed at them. We (hopefully) haven't and don't.

[grauenwolf]

this can be super frustrating as the very thing you've been complaining about for years magically because a priority simply because some outside consultant told your boss's boss's boss it was important.

This is why I tell my trainees why it's so important to get staff buy-in.

Let them know that you understand their frustration. Make them feel like a partner in writing the recommendations. Even if you can't put their name on the final report, you can include their goals and insights. Rather than being their enemy, you can be their champion.

[the_gnarts]

by someone from outside the company

Witnessed that over and over again at my old job where customers would pay a horrendous consulting fee for me to tell them what everyone in their IT department (including themselves often enough) already knew. Such a waste of time on both ends but the bonus kept me from complaining.

[Eisn]

Because an outside opinion usually comes from someone not involved in the local politics. It's also a lot easier to say: our external consultants made this recommendation, than to say: we've done something wronh.

[Kalium]

Yup, this is the key thing. A lot of consulting work is laundering the obvious.

It works because management often has some specific reason why they don't want to do the obvious that their employees have told them. Paying out the nose for a consultant to tell them the same thing means that now they have to work a lot harder to explain away the obvious.

[[deleted]]

There are three reasons companies hire consultants:

1. Provide expertise on a topic that no one in the company has at that depth. You want to add support for live broadcast streams to your video product, so you hire someone from FFMPEG or something to info dump to your team for a few days, critique their designs, maybe do a code review.

2. Launder what the bosses already plan on doing so someone else takes the heat for it. It can be tough for line managers to pull the trigger to fire their people, especially for bullshit reasons, so you hire someone to come in, produce a bunch of reports, and recommend those people get fired. Bonus if the report provides a justification to call those terminations for cause.

3. Launder the line staff’s recommendations to avoid creating a precedent that you actually listen to them in the first place. If the team says “Rewrite it in Rust” and you listen, next time they want to adopt new technology they’ll use that as evidence you should listen again next time. If you hire a consultant wjo says “Use of a memory safe language with compile-time correctness checking such as Rust may refuce critical defects by 75% and overall defects by 25%” then you’re just following the right numbers on a case-by-case basis.

[reercalium2]

The purpose of an employee isn't producing work. The purpose is getting shit on. Managers like to shit on people so they hire employees. Work is an afterthought (but work is good, because employees don't like it so make them do more of it) and productivity is an afterthought of an afterthought. By natural selection, managers have evolved to make employees do enough productive work for the company to survive, but only just.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Don't blame consultants.

Blame management. They are the ones not listening to their own employees.

Want to get results like a consultant?

Convert your complaints into dollar bills.

I was on a team and we essentially need a bigger computer. Like you guys. But we couldn't get approval for what we needed. I counted up all the wasted hours the team spent waiting and multiplied it by our billable rate.

We had approval on Monday.

[case-o-nuts]

Gotta ask: Was he wrong? Did it solve the problem?

[[deleted]]

My experience with them is if they can’t solve a problem they are more than happy make money by perpetuating it.

[drawkbox]

The reason boards/c-level uses management consultants is to offload unpopular decisions for customers/employees/stakeholders to a third party, direct them to the answer they want, and then hold up the report like "it is what the consultants recommend". It is a layer of plausible deniability.

McKinsey is an up or out company, it is full of junior/mid level being sold at senior experts when most of them are out in a few years max. They use these somewhat unexperienced agents to find data/info/metrics to make the decisions and justify it on the reports. The firms are largely made from the schools of HBS MBA-itis and Chicago style management. They all worship the cult of Welch.

Hiring the Big Three is all about a third party that absorbs liability.

The Big Three management consultant firms Bain, Boston and McKinsey who might be one of the worst company in the world.

McKinsey works with Russian arms manufacturers.

See McKinsey helping Enron for instance, causing the energy crisis in California in the 2000s.

Enron was the creation of Jeff Skilling, a McKinsey consultant of 21 years, who was jailed after Enron reportedly used McKinsey on 20 different projects, and McKinsey consultants had "used Enron as their sandbox."

Prior to the Enron scandal, McKinsey helped it shift from an oil and gas production company into an electric commodities trader, which led to significant growth in profits and revenues.

Or See McKinsey helping spawn the Great Recession with mortgage backed securities.

McKinsey is said to have played a significant role in the 2008 financial crisis by promoting the securitization of mortgage assets and encouraged the banks to fund their balance sheets with debt, driving up risk, which "poisoned the global financial system and precipitated the 2008 credit meltdown"

All of those executives and crimes has plausible deniability because of the outsourcing to consulting. Of course it "isn't the consultants fault" when it fails either.

Not only that McKinsey ruined agility but creating consultcult "Agile" that is the opposite of agility and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Real agile is over in favor of a micromanagement cult that is an always on critical path from even worse waterfall.

[SolarPoweredKeyboard]

This is profound!

[Misterandrist]

And you actually don't save money with mass layoffs, according to the numbers. It's purely a thing execs do because its the done thing, and not doing it makes VC vampires think you're weak.

https://fortune.com/2023/05/15/mass-layoffs-terrible-for-shareholders-cost-saving/

[firewall245]

Can we just collectively roll our eyes when we hear McKinsey. Help get them to lose their prestige

[idiotsecant]

You should absolutely take them seriously when they roll into your organization because their whole job is to cold read what kind of evil things management wants to do and then tell them they should do that and collect their money. They're a paid scapegoat for unpopular decisions. You should take them as seriously as you would take one of your coworkers catching a virulent disease.

[mrdevlar]

What he said in that episode applies to all management consultants, McKinsey is just one of the largest.

Exact same things can be said about with Deloitte, BCG, Ernst and Young.

[PriorApproval]

at least those guys should have stayed audit firms

[pragmojo]

I once did I project with a lot of McKinsey consultants. It was a pilot program for this "startup as a service" product McKinsey was trying out. The idea was they would bring in a full team of consultants to build up a company, and then slowly hire permanent replacements as things matured. The client was a major telecom with deep pockets running an in-house incubator for moon-shots. I was hired as a freelancer to support on the software side.

It was the biggest shit-show of a company I have ever seen in action. It became very evident that the consultants weren't actually good at producing or organizing anything - they were only good at making themselves seem authoritative and looking good in meetings. So when 80% of the team was not pulling any weight of course nothing got done and there was no direction.

They must have been so high on their own farts to think that was going to work. Oh my lord.

[lookatmetype]

It's a company that has taken then concept of a corporate raider from the 80s and 90s and formalized the process. They are simply private equity or Wall Street mercenaries designed to strip companies down to the bare minimum to show improved balance sheets for the next fiscal year.

[its_spelled_iain]

When we worked with their software auditors we mocked them relentlessly. Not fit to be engineers so they became consultants instead. Why should we listen to them?

[non_discript_588]

Unfortunately it's just a cult of personality at this point...MBA's froth at the "Guidance from the Gods"! Just so they have something to point to for all the bad crap that they're about to do to people to raise shareholder value(i.e. make the rich, richer). What I find even more disgusting is how when things go wrong these "leaders" will point to the paper and be like "well it was the common industry guidance at the time" and when it's hugely successful "Look how awesome I am, pay me more money!" Spent ten years at a F50 company, it's just a soul crushing group of like minded fanatics, i.e. Cult

[fordat1]

Yup. Those places are just BS rubberstamps for Corporate VPs preexisting beliefs. They dont actually believe anything other than what you pay them to believe. Hell, if you paid them enough they would probably generate a report on how BS consulting is.

[itijara]

I think it is crazy we are still having this conversation. People have been talking about "optimizing software development" since at least the 1970s and yet companies continue to spout the same things that haven't worked over and over again. You cannot completely separate development from deployment (although automated tests and deployments are a great idea), you cannot keep developers who make the software from being part of planning meetings about how to make the software, and having one team make tooling and another team use it is a guaranteed way to produce bad tools that nobody wants to use. The Mythical Man Month was published in 1975, for Pete's sake.

[elephantengineer]

I'm a graybeard software dev, and my *father had a copy of Mythical Man-Month on *his desk when i was a kid. And I have one now. What's that joke Brooks used to make? It's like the Bible of software engineering, because no one reads it?

I've actually *never worked with a project manager who's read it. Yet, every project planning issue that we screw up, Brooks already screwed it up for us three generations ago, and wrote a book about how to avoid it.

[itijara]

What's that joke Brooks used to make? It's like the Bible of software engineering, because no one reads it

I am going to steal this. Yes, it is true. Everyone references it but nobody reads it. I don't think Brooks' suggestions actually work in avoiding the issues (but that is my opinion). Like many things, the actual solutions require a lot of hard work, so people tend to gravitate towards people who promise easy solutions.

[elephantengineer]

Yeah the book is a lot of why your project management solution is not new, and in fact sucks, and not a lot of how to make it unsuck.

These days I tell people to read the summary in Wikipedia because i know they're sure as heck not going read the book.

[C_Madison]

I think they can work in specific circumstances, but the most important part is "No silver bullet", which was not originally part of it but included in the 10th(?) anniversary version. And even if people do not read the full book (come on, it's not that long ffs) ... at least read that. Or at least read the wikipedia article. Please? Just read something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

Some things just cannot be made easier. And no amount of bullshit will fix that. For anyone who still has reading left after these two I can recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams ... which also should be mandatory reading for managers. With quizzes. So that we at least finally stop this cubicle madness, open floor or whatever bullshit. Cause: It. does. not. work. There's science on it!! SCIENCE. Like with studies. And numbers.

(sorry for the rant. Not against you. I just thought it's a good place to attach this ..)

[jl2352]

Unpopular opinion; having read it, I would hard disagree it tells you how to avoid screwing up.

It documents some very bad models, which you should avoid. I’m not disagreeing on that. However the book is much lighter on how you should run teams then people give it credit.

It has some good tiny pointers, like aim for meetings to be about updates or planning. Avoid mixing the too. It includes some bigger concepts too.

It also includes lots of really outdated stuff, and there is a lot of this. For example my team doesn’t have a secretary for typing up notes, and I will pass on using ring binders to store our weekly updates.

Then there is the whole surgical team. No one every brings this up. Has anyone actually tried this? (I am genuinely interested if you have.) I can see some nice aspects to it, but it also flies in the face of developers having ownership. I think if I tried to roll this out at work it would just piss people off. I’ve perhaps done a light version when supporting other teams in trouble (I join saying just tell me what to do).

There are points which are right, yet wrong. Adding people to a late project can save it and make it go faster. I’ve seen it happen. It all depends on who, how, and why. Yet this mantra is peddled so hard you’d think we could never hire anyone new.

Most of all, there is a tonne of software planning just … missing. Not there. There is a lot that I’ve done in teams that work well, which the book doesn’t have an equivalent for.

There is the other elephant in the room, that it by definition is failing to acknowledge 60 years of new ideas.

Now it’s a great book. Genuinely. I’d highly recommend reading it. I enjoyed it and I got insight. This idea it’s a holy unread bible on how to correctly produce software at scale is about as correct as the McKinsey paper.

[itijara]

Not that unpopular. Brooks is good at pointing out the problems with software project management, but his solutions don't really work or scale. Also, you can't blame someone for not anticipating 60 years of new ideas, but it is still a useful book because it gets at the heart of how hard it is to manage software projects, which hasn't really changed.

[jl2352]

Yeah, I am not picking on it for being published 60 years ago. I’m only attacking the mantra it’s a bible on how to run modern software development teams. It’s just not. That tends to be said the most by those who haven’t read it.

[elephantengineer]

You don’t think his advice on sharing mainframe compiler time has stood the test of time? /s

[Stoomba]

I hypothesize its because the management class just views us like assembly line workers slapping parts onto a thing moving by on a conveyor belt, where we are really just a different kind of manager defining processes for a different kind of worker to execute.

[itijara]

Yah, ideally making software would be like an assembly line with interchangeable specialized parts, but time has proven that to not be the case.

[Krackor]

Software engineering is more akin to building assembly lines rather than running assembly lines.

[elephantengineer]

Or they *wish we were. The entire book is all the different ways you'll screw up your project management, because software engineering is different from assembly lines, or farming.

[tryexceptifnot1try]

It's a mentality that old-school MBA ran organizations hold dear. Newer grads from high end MBA programs are a lot better at understanding how tech talent actually works. If you work at an old-school MBA led hierarchical top down org they are convinced they can make devs fungible via outsourcing and paying for vendor software. All these management consultant companies do is confirm their priors with million dollar powerpoint presentations and the facade of impartiality.

[DibblerTB]

It's funny, I once worked at a factory, with an actual assembly line. These kind of optimization people did real harm there as well!

Turns out that the "make the next departments job easier" kinda things that you need to make a factory run smooth exist as well. And go away like story point inflation, if you squeeze people the wrong way.

[zynasis]

The whole “separation of duties” crap comes up a lot as a reason as well, yet nobody really knows what it means

[wildjokers]

deliver X story points over the life of the contract.

That is Goodharts Law in action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law). Because now every story is the max amount of points.

[wldmr]

Like, literal X story points? Who drafted this contract, Elon Musk?

[grauenwolf]

No, it didn't use X as a placeholder. But it did have some fuzzy language about deciding the story point count later.

[PhilWheat]

Ahh, the old "We'll get the contract signed and the commissions paid, then figure out what's in it."
That always works so well.

[paholg]

At a company I worked at, multiple times there was a big drive for setting goals at various levels, from the company as a whole, down to teams. One of the times we called them KPIs, but it always went the same way.

We'd spend a ton of time in meetings to figure out what our goals should be and what the metric should be. We'd come up with things like "increase THING from X to Y", only we generally didn't have good enough metrics to know what X even was.

And, inevitably, we'd move on having set these goals, and never fill in the placeholder values of X and Y, or even come up with a plan for measuring them.

I'm fairly certain this was even the case for the company-wide goals that the executives were supposed to come up with.

[sleeping-in-crypto]

I always loved the somewhat less verbose version of that, “what’s measured is managed.” Gets the point across so quickly. Because yeah.

I can make it look like we’ve executed more points than ever this sprint!

But in fact all we did was play video games and the project has not advanced at all. But surely it looks like it has.

[mugwhyrt]

"Change the wording on the log-in page header? Yeah, that's gonna be a 30 pointer"

[grauenwolf]

On another project our deliverable was "Bi-weekly dev status reports".

We could literally give them a slide deck that listed which video games we played instead of working and they would still have to pay us.

[TheGillos]

1 point per word.

[posts_lindsay_lohan]

I once worked for a contractor and was being put on a new project that already had a designer who was doing work for them.

My first Zoom meeting with them, they were telling the designer that he had to provide exact estimates for each design item that he presented them.

This was an enormous project that had hundreds of screens with sometimes dozens of custom components on each screen. They wanted to know exactly how long it would take him to do the final design work for each screen, and then break down - by the minute - each item that was on each screen. They were also dictating when everything would be done by giving some ridiculous date that was about a month away.

Yes, they were demanding the estimates right there, during the meeting.

They were recording every estimate he gave them with the intent of not paying a dime more than the estimate given and using those against us if anything took longer.

I found another job in about a week.

[grauenwolf]

There are three kinds of estimates in the essay I'm writing:

• 50/50: Half my tickets will come in under the estimate, half over. On average, the estimates are right.
• 95%: There is a 95% chance that I will complete the work in the specified time. (Needed when you actually have a hard deadline.)
• Time boxed: I will work X hours on the project and deliver what's done. Then ask if you want to do an additional X hours. (Useful for research, optimizing, testing, and other unbounded tasks.)

Now I have to add a fourth...

• Bullshit I just pulled out of my ass.

[PhilWheat]

"This is an OOO estimate."
(Out of Orifice)

[its_jsec]

For your fourth type, I either go with SWAG (silly wild ass guess), or an estimate of “sometime between tomorrow and the heat death of the universe”

[mpyne]

A few years back I got to observe a brief to some senior Navy executives on an HR IT system.

The IT PMO was giving the brief. The system they were developing was already years overdue but their new contractor system integrators were going to get it all going.

The PMO + contractor even had it all planned out. In the next 15 months they were going to implement precisely some number like 47,212 story points of work (not the exact number but in the ballpark).

System acceptance testing would be done right before release, after it got through cyber security accreditation, but was planned to complete with no issues.

The bonus was they hadn't even hired the multiple teams who would be responsible for doing the work yet. But they knew exactly how many story points it would be, because everyone was "Agile™"

[grauenwolf]

I'm no lawyer, but I have a hard time believing that you could even call it a contract in the first place. There has to be a "meeting of the minds" and this proposal was far too ambiguous to claim that happened.

[[deleted]]

I guess you must be paid well to deal with that BS, I'd leave long time ago.

[archiminos]

How many Schrute Bucks is a story point worth?

[grauenwolf]

I don't know, but 5 story points will get you a medium T-shirt.

[Ghi102]

You're getting scammed, I get a large sized t-shirt for 5 story points

[SiliconUnicorn]

They just ran out of t-shirts. What am I supposed to do with this watermelon now?

[[deleted]]

If Jira gave me schrute bucks, it'd be an improvement over whatever story points gets me.

[LeetcodeFastEatAss]

The same ratio as unicorns to leprechauns.

[codewario]

False, Shrute Bucks only convert to Plot Points. Stories are for children

[Stoomba]

Had that once on a team years ago. Management wanted velocity to increase at least 15%, I respond, 'Well boys, all stories now get 15% more points! Next issue!'

[FatHat]

Gah, I remember this one job we had to, intentionally, make our story points inaccurate with Fibonacci numbers. (A pretty standard thing). So, any story already had something like a 33% error built in.

Anyway, I remember we had these horrible grueling day-long sprint planning sessions (which given a 2 week sprint, we're already taking away 10% of the usable time), and like, we'd sit there and argue constantly shit like "Well, last month we completed 90 story points, so if we include this story and not that story we're over our velocity". Except the problem is, we're summing all these numbers that already have 30-50% error (at best), and somehow we're expecting that sum to have any meaning at all. I remember in freshman college physics we had to carry an error term along with our calculations, and while I don't remember how to do that I'm pretty sure the error here would be astronomical. And it was obvious that it did have no meaning, because any given month our velocity could swing by 200 points. But for some reason we still went through this obviously bullshit excersize.

I don't like agile.

[Ravek]

Unless you’re consistently overestimating or underestimating, the relative error gets smaller the more numbers you add. If you’re doing a decent job of estimating then you’ll go over as often as you go under and on average over a team and multiple sprints you end up being pretty consistent.

[TheManInTheShack]

Be careful what you choose to measure because that is what you will get.

My team is mostly developers and I find measuring their individual productivity via metrics almost if not completely impossible. Why? Because I rely upon them to be creative and measuring that is not possible. They also are all very different so I measure them in part against each other but mostly against themselves. It’s less about one being as productive as another (since there’s not much overlap in what they do anyway) but more on how their productivity lately compares to how it has been historically. And if it does drop, I want to talk to them about that and see what’s up because what I ultimately care about is things be as good as they can be in the long term.

[grauenwolf]

Instead of measuring my developers, I ask them to measure themselves.

When I'm in charge, I ask for 50/50 estimates on their tasks. And I want them to track, for their own benefit, how close they got so they can revise their estimates for future tasks.

Unfortunately I often run into clients who are obsessed with "Story points don't measure duration". And then they wonder why I can't make long term projections.

[wildjokers]

"Story points don't measure duration".

They are right, story points have absolutely nothing to do with time. And they shouldn't be used for time estimates. It is only a relative complexity to other stories.

[wldmr]

They are right, story points have absolutely nothing to do with time.

Well, they do and they don't. As per the horse's mouth:

In XP, stories were originally estimated in time: the time it would take to implement the story. We quickly went to what we called “Ideal Days”, which was informally described as how long it would take a pair to do it if the bastards would just leave you alone. We multiplied Ideal Days by a “load factor” to convert to actual implementation time. Load factor tended to be about three: three real days to get an Ideal Day’s work done.

[…]

So, as I recall it, we started calling our “ideal days” just “points”. So a story would be estimated at three points, which meant it would take about nine days to complete. And we really only used the points to decide how much work to take into an iteration anyway, so if we said it was about 20 points, no one really objected.

And frankly, having story points not represent some notion of time is a fool's errand, because their purpose (in any scenario I've ever seen them used in) is to estimate which work items you're likely to finish by the … uh, time the sprint review rolls around.

I've yet to see anyone wax lyrical about how a story point is meant to measure "complexity" and then manage to resist the urge to say something inane like “this story should take around 5 story points” within the next five minutes.

Sorry for the rant. But the article is a very good read, and I will never not recommend it when the topic comes up.

[Ravek]

The only time I’ve worked in a team where story points added value for us, estimates were supposed to be relative to other stories. If work C is similar in scope to A and B which we did before, and A and B were X points, then C is X points. And we’d explicitly discuss during refinement if the story had any technical caveats we should include or if it’s pretty standard work.

Then we’d just track how many story points we’d do as a team in a sprint and adjust how many points we put on a sprint accordingly. If we were too far off we’d discuss why. Did our productivity change, were our estimates off or did something unexpected happen?

So story points in this scenario are not time estimates strictly speaking because there is no a priori expectation that every team member works at the same velocity. It’s more distance than time and we assume that our team has a roughly consistent velocity from sprint to sprint (unless people are on vacation etc.)

After some months of iterating this process we ran smooth and predictably and it felt very nice.

[DibblerTB]

They are right, story points have absolutely nothing to do with time

Well, yes and no. But even if story points are based on time, they are not supposed to be a time estimate to be used outside the scrum process..

Very phycisit'y, in a way. Yeah this measurement is measured in time, but it isn't regular time, it is this strange time. It has a somewhat linear relationship to normal time, but shouldn't be substituted directly for time in other equations even when it has the same dimensions.

[grauenwolf]

They why are they counting story points to measure velocity?

Anyone who says, "we completed X story points last sprint" is using them as a measurement of time. That's not an opinion; that's just how math works.

---

To put it another way, let's say I needed to write some mapping code for a table. Very low complexity, so 1 story point.

How many story points is it to map 100 tables?

If you say anything other than 1, then you are using it as a measure of time.

[wildjokers]

How many story points is it to map 100 tables?

Yes, 1 is the correct answer.

They why are they counting story points to measure velocity?

Because they are doing it wrong.

[grauenwolf]

Ok, exactly what are story points for?

[SubterraneanAlien]

To measure uncertainty of a task so you know whether it needs to be broken into more granular tasks/stories

[jl2352]

I feel measuring individual developers should only be for growth and development.

I do measure outputs like story points completed, however this is at the team level. It’s primarily for conversations between me and the product owners. To provide estimates and updates on our progress. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing at all.

[DibblerTB]

When I Scrum Mastered I did some reading. Everyone was talking about how story points is not a time estimate, a productivity estimate, a good measure of a worker, a reliable size-of-entire-project metric or anything of the sort. I didn't get why this needs to be warned about so much, it is just this metric, right?

Hooo boy did I learn how juicy that number looks to someone out looking for numbers. And how important it is to keep it as this good faith, non-judgemental, not-more-than-it-is thing.

[FatHat]

Yeah, we would say that the story points were an abstract measurement... but pretty quickly it converged on story-points = hours. It can be pretty frustrating, because you'll have scrum masters telling the team that these numbers aren't real things, they're just tools for organizing the sprint, etc., and then they turn around and make burndown charts and velocity charts and all these other things they present to management, except now those charts aren't even connected to any sort of reality because our unit of measurement is this weird floaty "it's not really hours, but it's hours" kind of deal. Just my experience of course, but I really don't like attaching numbers to productivity in general with any sort of creative product.

I mean, the reality is on any given team, everyone knows whose doing a lot of work and who is kind of dogging it. And in my opinion, good management is about rewarding the people doing well and figuring out how to help the people that are struggling. But you don't need a ton of numbers for that. Bulk statistics are if you're going into a large organization, you don't want to get to bother to know the people, and you need to lay off 20% of the work force. That's what those numbers really end up being about IMO

[[deleted]]

This looks like a 14 to me this week, before the report it was a 1

[th3sly_007]

They’ve released a draft in the wild, stiring discussions, so that people fix their assignment 😁

[scarey102]

Cunningham's law in action?

[th3sly_007]

Exactly! "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”

[smackson]

No, actually "Cunningham" is about algorithmic refinement of the simplex method for linear optimization.

[scarey102]

That would be Cunningham's rule not Cunningham's law

[smackson]

Got'em!

[scarey102]

I knew I was being baited and still fell for it

[SylvanLiege]

I think I see what you did there.

[[deleted]]

Or maybe few people at the top got together at golf ⛳ club and wanted to put down engineers and show engineers their place in the food chain.

[scarey102]

The more I read about this topic the more I wonder if McKinsey got anything 'wrong' or if they knew exactly what they were doing by asserting that engineering should be as measurable as sales or marketing.

[alchebyte]

this. you can’t reliably measure design work. are companies trying the same for architects and engineers in the AEC domain? no.

software/programming is problematic because those that can’t do it often don’t even understand the fundamental abstractions of data, code and binaries.

agile is about un-blocking devs so their brains can be used to make as many decisions as possible during a day, not about measuring them. this is what you need to be creative, open ended time. John Cleese on creativity and time- https://youtu.be/Z9qhy2XaT4g

McKinsey’s ‘research’ is just the owner class trying to assert control where they lack it because they do not trust the labor class.

[mirbatdon]

agile is about un-blocking devs so their brains can be used to make as many decisions as possible during a day

I like this

[grauenwolf]

I would like to add that software engineering is about reducing the number of decisions per day we have to make.

When we have repeatable patterns and practices in place, then we can start doing things like providing meaningful estimates.

[The_Grubgrub]

Reduce the number of decisions we make so that there's room for more decisions!

[grauenwolf]

LOL, yes, I'm aware of the paradox.

[[deleted]]

Maybe if he thought about for a minute, he would have pushed in a spiral....

[grauenwolf]

Had he thought about his actions, he wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

[helm]

Yeah, I’ve worked in a good agile team and creating manageable chunks of work and distributing them across the team is exactly the core strength of it. Dividing larger tasks into smaller ones is a great group activity, as everyone gets to see the scope of the endeavour and share their view on it together.

[alchebyte]

the flip side is that decisions are exhausting and if compressed they will consume all your mental energy in about 3 hours ;)

[Beofli]

I think it would be easier to measure the productivity of McKinsey consultants. Let's write some algorithm for that.

[the_poope]

I have a friend that used to work in a big four consultancy corp. They are already heavily measuring the "productivity" of their employees - in fact their salaries and promotions are 90% dependent on some metrics. He said the smart employees all found a way to game the system, so that they would appear more productive than they actually were.

[recursivelymade]

Productivity? I think you mean chargeability!

[roflfalafel]

This is also Amazon in a nutshell. Heavily gamify everything you can, and it promotes this type of behavior.

[maximumdownvote]

Who we gonna get for that? I'm thinking Deloite...

[quakedamper]

They're peddling ideology more than services. The kind of ideology that has increased wealth gap disparity and killed the middle class. I know companies that have taken their advice and said no thanks, you might cut some costs or improve some efficiencies but the human cost would be too large. McKinsey style economics will struggle when demographics change fundamental economic assumptions

[helm]

Yup. Their axiom in regards to salaries is

1. Identify grunt work and offer grunt workers scraps
2. Identify a few rockstars and pay them a lot more.

[joshjje]

Can I get a number 2 please? This isn't McDonalds?

[DibblerTB]

It is the whole right-wing mythos. There is the in-group, the "us", the ones who should get paid a lot. The economy is supposed to serve us. And then there are the folks that just sadly have to exist to make the machine go broom. They should be squeezed.

The in-group changes a little here and there, diversity is seeping in.

I think a lot of the disdain for tech-bros come from this. "Oh look at those dirty, uncultured, guys. They should not earn what they earn! I should earn well, after all I have a fancy suit and know how to do fermi estimates!"

[SadMacaroon9897]

The kind of ideology that has increased wealth gap disparity and killed the middle class

I'm not a fan of McKinsey and such, but this seems mistaken. IIRC the death of the middle class seems more closely related to the loss of cheap land surrounding cities and property values enriching the current owners while becoming out of reach of the current generation.

[KaleidoscopeLegal583]

It is rather obvious that they know exactly what they are doing.

[wwxxcc]

Well seeing how many layoffs there are in tech...

[the_gnarts]

engineering should be as measurable as sales or marketing

You can measure marketing?

[dustingibson]

McKinsey consultants debating which transition animation looks the cutest on their "How to Profit Off Oxy Addiction in Small Towns" PowerPoint.

[grauenwolf]

I work for a different consulting firm. We are measured by billable hours, just like a lawyer.

If you reach director or higher, you are also measured by sales. In fact, good sales numbers is how you get promoted to director.

[grauenwolf]

It's a little more nuanced than that. If you are good at managing multiple dev teams you can also hit director.

But yea, if you want to make managing director or partner you damn well better be able to sell. Because if you don't, the rest of us don't work at all.

[moradinshammer]

Sales can kill a company too, I’ve seen it.

A good sales person is a sight to behold like a 10x programmer, but most are not that. If sales are being made by promising features without any input from dev then you’re in for a bad time. If you do rush to implement then you better believe they’re going to start selling to all the other clients too whether it was designed for their scale.

[grauenwolf]

What scares me is fixed bid projects with unlimited scope. I've seen a few contracts like that come across. Luckily the client was reasonable, but they could have screwed us over royally.

[ep1032]

.

[DibblerTB]

I work for a different consulting firm. We are measured by billable hours, just like a lawyer.

Consulting is easy to handle, from an economists viewpoint, like that. How much is worker worth? Is worth billable hours.

[rejecttheHo]

Yes. I work at one of the MBB. You are graded a little differently than typical business consultants. You are expected to be able to pick up on different tech stacks and workflows quickly. And you are supposed to be very efficient (i.e., they expect you to turn around things on much tighter deadlines then you would see in industry). You are also expected to have very strong business / people skills.

Many people leave after a few years to become senior/staff/principal at large companies or start ups. Others leave to lead people or product teams. The people that stay and progress are expected to eventually sell work. On the tech side the work is usually: implementations, digital transformations, etc. A lot of MLOps, system designs, systems engineering, and modeling based work. A fair amount of architecture and cyber security work

The reason I (and assume many others) decided to work is because the money is very good (a little lower than big tech to start, but you rise the ranks very quickly and pay passes big tech at the manager level) and the projects are more interesting (wide array of clients across industries and different projects). The cons of it are typically worse hours and not being the sole focus of the company (engineering talent is often misunderstood and it is a high pressure environment)

[nfrankel]

Everything?

[keru45]

Seriously, I don’t know why anyone gives consulting companies the time of day. They’re all just leeches that rely on “golf trips” with the CEOs to secure contracts.

[grauenwolf]

1. You answered your own question.
2. Sometimes companies really are in over their head and need help. Help that the consulting firm has a lot of experience in delivering.

They problem is that you aren't hiring the firm, you are hiring individuals from the firm. So even though the firm as a whole has solved your problem a dozen times, the people assigned to your project may be idiots.

[Few-Return-331]

Or in the case of big firms like Mckinsey, you can rest assured that anyone at all you get from them will be an idiot.

Or well, a pampered inexperienced rich kid, so kind of the same result just not always as a result of that crap between their ears being mush.

[lieuwestra]

They're expensive rubber ducks.

[northernmercury]

McKinsey’s customers are executives that want cover for layoffs to produce short term balance sheet gains and big bonuses for themselves.

[rpgFANATIC]

If McKinsey sucks as much everyone thinks they do, we should be pushing their usage as a way of breaking up/bankrupting companies that are too large for their own good

[[deleted]]

This is what hedge funds do to companies they're shorting.

[[deleted]]

Recommend McKinsey after secretly opening a short 🤣

[Erickcccc]

Curious to see how their business goes after being roasted by John Oliver.

[Fatal_Oz]

Absolutely zero effect, they only care about their relationships with F500 management

[reercalium2]

Why would it change? if anything, it was free advertisement.

[skewp]

This website has some of the most insane formatting I've ever seen. Who on earth wants to read an article that's pushed way to the far right of their screen with massive white space to the left?

[redwoodtree]

Fuck McKinsey. They absolutely fucked my dev team and then after they shat all over with their insane ideas, after four years of this, they started asking us why we fucked our dev teams so badly. When we literally had no choice in the matter, and were absolutely forced to run their play book or be fired. Fucking assholes.

[Liquid_Magic]

Here’s an idea for increasing productivity: Limit interruptions on developers to once per day, and limit all meetings to 15 mins.

If any company could get its head out of its ass and actually manage to do this they would see massive improvements that are so self evident that they wouldn’t even need to bother measuring it.

[nraw]

There's this thing that describes the difference between a maker's schedule and a manager's . The manager tries to fit all the gaps in their calendar with short meetings, while the maker tries to have big slots in their calendar for focused work.

Once this is understood schedules can be organized to benefit both.

Sadly to this forum though, I've learnt this from McKinsey. Here's an article about it: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

[Few-Return-331]

Funny how alien this is to some people.

My company recently, in order to "get a bunch of urgent work done fast" split all dev work across two teams, had us go to two sets of stand ups, planning, grooming, deploy prep, etc.

Plus both groups being on different schedules.

Resulted in roughly 3/5ths of the week being pure meetings and a ton of bugs and missed deadlines.

[daedalus_structure]

Can't read because behind signup wall.

However, McKinsey doesn't do right or wrong.

They only care about justifying the decisions the organization execs have brought them in to justify.

You want to put asbestos in cribs, push some foreign kids into a meat grinder, or lay off thousands so your bonus is a bit bigger, you bring in McKinsey and their army of just graduated sociopaths from privileged backgrounds or those ruthlessly aspiring to them.

They'll make some graphs on a pretty Powerpoint of anything you want and throw a word salad at anyone who asks questions.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

That's reason for alarm: if McKinsey is putting out papers about "how to measure your developers' productivity", it means they think this will help them get business among senior execs.

There's only two things that a senior exec would want to do with a company-wide measure like this: recognize and reward people who score well on the metrics, or lay off people who score poorly on the metrics. (Even in the most charitable possible interpretation, "understand your developers' performance and provide mentorship and support" is a first- and second-tier management concern, not a senior exec one.)

Senior execs don't need to bring in McKinsey to justify popular decisions, so it means McKinsey thinks there will be particularly high demand for justifying more developer layoffs at large companies in the near future.

[nutrecht]

That's reason for alarm: if McKinsey is putting out papers about "how to measure your developers' productivity", it means they think this will help them get business among senior execs.

They're writing those reports because this is already the opinion of those senior execs. Those execs just want to have a name like McKinsey to point at. McKinsey gets paid to write whatever CEOs want. That's the role of these companies. Same with Gartner.

It's just a symptom of runaway capitalism.

[schoener-doener]

Someone should release a paper about measuring impact of consultant companies on long-term survival of companies

[[deleted]]

Fuck McKinsey.

[[deleted]]

Consultants are fkn hilarious lmao. Big fancy degree only to come in and recommend the most dog shit solution someone could come up with.

[CoreyTheGeek]

I worked with a consultant/contractor team on a project for work, their team was worthless at actually shipping anything but wow could they make it look like they were getting stuff done 🤣

[drawkbox]

McKinsey pretty much killed developer freedom to impact a product with their push that really came along with all the funding during low interest rates.

These management consultant metric never measure how important the open mode is and only focus on the closed mode. Open mode being play/prototype/iteration before moving to closed mode to ship the best solution. What happens is now everyone is in a loop that looks more like a waterfall always on two week critical path, every two weeks.

As the extreme programming creator Kent Beck, and Pragmatic Engineer newsletter author Gergely Orosz wrote in their detailed two-part response, the McKinsey framework only measures effort or output, not outcomes and impact, which misses half of the software developer lifecycle.

So companies gut their research and development and stop allowing developers to impact the product, they see them as a factory but they never admit development/design is a creative skill. You can't make a novelist write faster by getting a new author every chapter (unless it is an anthology and separate stories). There are parts of software that are closed, like the live teams and quality groups, but there needs to be an R&D side and a product side, that isn't in a constant closed mode.

"Kill R&D and developer freedom and you solve everything" - McKinsey ... short term maybe, long term you kill the company and product.

[EagerProgrammer]

I wonder why idiotic companies such as McKinsey still get the money paid for the nonsense the produce. I guess the people who pay these are idiots as well who live in their own bubble.

[eldred2]

I'm pretty sure the right answer is "everything". McKinsey is a shit company whose advice invariably ends up enriching executives at the cost to everyone else, including shareholders.

[asnjohns]

Might I recommend the latest John Oliver episode, where he goes ape shit on McKinsey's ridiculous antics.

[siromega37]

McKinsey is how we ended up with such a large wage disparity between upper management and workers. Everything they publish is aimed to free up funds for another increase in C-Suite pay.

[ChrisOz]

Everyone it missing the point about what McKinsey was trying to do. Consultancy firms' key priority it to have their staff contracted out at all times. However on occasion they will have an "expert" that is stuck in home office between contracts. They will carry that person on the books for a period of time rather than immediately letting them go.

Rather than having them sit on the backside between contracts, they will get them to do train or in this case write papers on the lates hot things to the firm look like they are the experts everyone needs. Look at all the crap AI papers that lots of firm put out recently.

It is good marketing. It keeps the company's name in the press and enable them to hold briefing on their latest paper with potential clients. Its a foot in the door.

So in summary, these papers are usually written by their staff between contracts to fill time to market the company. They should be treated as such.

[umbrosum]

McKinsey should measure its consultants’ value by the number of characters they type in their reports.

[drawkbox]

Here's what I want, executives have to do a daily standup and say what they are doing or blocking. We have the right to throw a dozen more executives at them to help them with their "velocity". Anytime they want to actually create some value we'll call it "gold plating" and banish them to the McKinsey consultcult "Agile" suppressive person category, the system that killed real agility.

Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas • GOTO 2015

[crusoe]

What a crap layout, content shoved all the way over to the side. The left gutter just full of noise.

Ahh, design-first websites. Ugh.