Do software developers deserve better incentives and rewards?

[kuhnster]

In many positions it is relatively easy to create incentives and performance rewards based on outcome based metrics.

However, we have yet to find an objective and useful metric for our development team.

What do you think works? Please share your ideas.

[chrisbennet]

How about "If we ship on time, everyone will get a raise to match market!"

Seriously though, good developers want to perform their best. You want to make developers happy? Let them ship code they are proud of. They are not idiots, letting them take Friday afternoon off to "reward" them for working on the weekend is kind of insulting.

Consider this: Are "productivity" metrics like hours in the office, lines of code, # bugs fixed, etc. something that actually helps ship code or are they done so managers have something to put in their spreadsheets?

Do managers think that developers can somehow tricked into being more productive?

I've been lucky to have great managers. They acted more like "target designators" [you know, the laser that guides bombs to the target] and less like commanders.

[canadaj]

I'm not sure I have a good answer to your question, but I remember reading somewhere a little story about a developer on a team whose net lines of code written (total written - total removed) was always at a negative or small value. This would imply laziness or perhaps just deleting comments or garbage, but interestingly enough, the developer was refactoring large chunks of code.

Maybe a fun little metric/competition could be "Fewest net lines of code written while maintaining full/greater functionality"

[kuhnster]

Really interesting. We have debated lines of code type metrics. There's no easy answer that isn't merely superficial. I would love some heavy hitter hackers to weigh in with more thoughts.