[muskmusk]

I an not sure these fairly one dimensional views are useful. Completely agree with the premises that it is the managers job to know what their people are doing. I have also worked at companies where the managers weren't doing their job. I can also completely see how an overfocus on metrics kills an otherwise good company.

I don't agree with the conclusion though: metrics are bad.

In software, in theory, you don't need metrics. You just write good code that does what it needs to do. Add tests to prove it, you are good. In reality though everyone agrees that metrics are a good thing to have. Why do we need them? Complexity and sometimes we just make mistakes. We could write software that is very close to bug free, but then we move at aerospace speed. Not always optimal.

Software metrics come with all the pitfalls of management metrics like over focus on metrics and not seeing the forest for the trees. Yet we still find the metrics useful.

Managers face many of the same problems, so they ask for metrics. I don't think that is bad. Being bad at using metrics is bad.

[ozim]

Blog post is about someone approaching author on "individual employee productivity tooling".

So it is not "all metrics are bad", it is "individual employee productivity tracking is bad".

On team level and across teams having trends and looking at trends before and after some change is helpful and can be done only when you have metrics of course.