Feeds for the Comic Strips
Unfair Firing or Not?
06-May-2007 14:14 GMT
Vote: 
Rating is 4 (8 votes)
Lessons Learned
There are certain excuses that are unacceptable when it comes to firing a developer. The comic strip illustrates one of these cases and the reasons behind that are:
1 - There are tasks that will not result in code changes (e.g., investigation only)
2 - There are issues that require weeks of work, specially in complex / legacy systems.
2 - There are issues that require weeks of work, specially in complex / legacy systems.
When we analyze a developer by looking at his "number of commits", "function points", "lines of code" per time unit (months / weeks) we are looking at just one of the faces of the problem!
A developer that works on a very difficult issue will tend to commit much less than someone that has been working on simpler tasks.
We have to keep in mind that the developer might not be a specialist in the area he/she was told to work on. This would be - in fact - a management problem instead of a problem in the developer itself.
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Comments
Total: 7 comments
11-May-2007 14:13 GMT
They missed one reason: maybe he was pairing at other developers' workstations. :-)
11-May-2007 14:14 GMT
Seen it happen, though not at an individual level.
Was part of a team working on part of an application as we as a team were reprimanded for not meeting our required KLOC count for 2 months running when doing major restructuring and cleanup of existing code.
That operation ended in the codebase shrinking by something like 20 KLOC over 2 months when the company had a requirement that we have a 100 KLOC result every month.
That -20 was of the result of scrapping some 150KLOC and creating another 130 while modifying something like 200KLOC but the simple metrics system they uses never showed that.
Almost cost us our performance bonus, hadn't the project manager stepped in and got that reprimand removed.
Was part of a team working on part of an application as we as a team were reprimanded for not meeting our required KLOC count for 2 months running when doing major restructuring and cleanup of existing code.
That operation ended in the codebase shrinking by something like 20 KLOC over 2 months when the company had a requirement that we have a 100 KLOC result every month.
That -20 was of the result of scrapping some 150KLOC and creating another 130 while modifying something like 200KLOC but the simple metrics system they uses never showed that.
Almost cost us our performance bonus, hadn't the project manager stepped in and got that reprimand removed.
11-May-2007 14:14 GMT
While I agree that LOC is a terrible metric, the cartoon is about doing only two commits during the last two months. Whether your refactoring or trying to tackle a big complex problem, you should be commiting every day or two. If you are worried about messing up the main code base that is why svn and cvs have tags and branches. People who don't commit changes often can be nightmare to work with and are often in need of a reprimand. (I have been reprimanded for it before, and I deserved it).
11-May-2007 14:23 GMT
Really, this can be either a bad developer or a bad manager.. sometimes people know how to fake work (like wally from dilbert =ppp) - everybody has seen someone like this...
but on the other side is really common that managers dont really understand not everything relies on commits..
but on the other side is really common that managers dont really understand not everything relies on commits..
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