[NTDF9]

I am glad this discussion is being brought to the fore. In my experience, far too many managers are clueless about what engineering actually means. They see it like warehouses or factories where the number of units shipped == output. But in engineering, number of PRs or commits or lines of code are meaningless. In fact, setting these output targets take away time from engineers in doing things such as meaningful design choices, system health investigations, cross-team situations.

I see software engineering more as a team sport than as an individual sport. In team sports, each individual sacrifices some metrics for the good of the team.

Here is my rant about how soccer teams would perform if they were evaluated like the McKinsey-style nonsense becoming pervasive in the tech industry: https://medium.com/@NTDF9/if-soccer-managers-did-performance...

[boxed]

This was a great writeup. And shows that this management style is not just about programming, but any activity at all. The article mentions sales as having just such maddening performance metrics and just brushes past it as ok/obvious/normal while it's just as crazy as your football example.