RE: Re: Sticking point

Dale Emery said:
> > So "working harder" is measured by hours?
> 
> It's certainly one important factor.  What others do you see? 
> If two people were working the same hours, what would lead 
> you to claim that one is working harder than the other?

Well, I'm not yet convinced that "working harder" is even the right thing to
measure.  Certainly "hours worked" is the wrong thing.  Maybe it's better to
measure accomplishments.  Maybe it's also good to work with people, so you
might perceive (without measurement) when they're working about as hard as
they can.  People have varying abilities--varying from person to person,
varying from time to time, varying from task to task.  I would think it's a
good thing to encourage the greatest accomplishments, even given the
inconsistencies and differing abilities of humans.

"Hours worked" is the simplest way of measuring humans at a task.  In my
opinion, it's probably the worst.  In a recent project, the VP in charge of
the project sent out a memo saying that the unrealistic schedule was
non-negotiable and that he expected people to start putting in 12-hour days.
Quite a number of people did put in such long hours, hacking away, copying
and modifying code with minimal, informal, manual testing.  I worked
test-first, and worked modest overtime.  Since the code ownership was pieced
out to the individual level, there wasn't really more work for me to do,
though I helped others as I could.  Mostly people were under too much stress
to attempt to work in more effective ways.

Some very buggy code was delivered on the deadline and the project declared
victory.  Shortly afterward, the VP in question was offered the opportunity
to look for other employment (not for this attitude, I think, but for other
things to which I'm not privy).  I found out from the new VP that the old
one was about to fire me as an underperformer.  My code was well-covered
with unit tests and very few problems have been attributed to it--but by the
measure of hours worked, I was not as productive as those whose code has
since been thrown out and completely rewritten.

It is this style of management that I see being courted in this forum.  I
don't think it's possible to "sell XP" to such a manager.

 - George

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