This is incredibly useful advice that essentially everyone who gets to make decisions in this space hates
This article makes sense to me as a developer and an occasional manager of developers and a former student of psychology and honestly if you meet and talk to people who do actual work in any capacity sometimes in your life and had any honest assessment of their day-over-day work over any appreciable period of this time you will have a hard time avoiding this conclusion
But businesspeople and especially high-level investors are rewarded for ignoring it. I've been in a few C-suite and board meetings and while you occasionally see the folks there talk about their underlings, they tend to mostly talk about abstract measures of outputs, with "velocity" being a popular term in tech orgs in particular. If they mention a worker by name, they tend to be high-ranking, perhaps a manager, but usually they are getting a lot done fast, or used to be and now aren't. Seldom is the latter kind of conversation had with remorse, sympathy, or the slightest hint that the prior state was a direct cause
Developers, especially experienced ones, often know what they need to get work done. They are often realistic about how much work to take on. They are incentivised to take on too much anyway, because the culture of business is fundamentally deeply broken
As far as I can tell, there has been no point since the invention of factories and metrics at which this has not been true, the rule rather than the exception among the entire classes of owners and high-level managers. And what's worse is that often competent ones of these can get some clout by delivering results by realizing this, but as more of them are added to the decision-making process, their ability to resist this tide, either socially or through direct loss of power, diminishes
This article makes sense to me as a developer and an occasional manager of developers and a former student of psychology and honestly if you meet and talk to people who do actual work in any capacity sometimes in your life and had any honest assessment of their day-over-day work over any appreciable period of this time you will have a hard time avoiding this conclusion
But businesspeople and especially high-level investors are rewarded for ignoring it. I've been in a few C-suite and board meetings and while you occasionally see the folks there talk about their underlings, they tend to mostly talk about abstract measures of outputs, with "velocity" being a popular term in tech orgs in particular. If they mention a worker by name, they tend to be high-ranking, perhaps a manager, but usually they are getting a lot done fast, or used to be and now aren't. Seldom is the latter kind of conversation had with remorse, sympathy, or the slightest hint that the prior state was a direct cause
Developers, especially experienced ones, often know what they need to get work done. They are often realistic about how much work to take on. They are incentivised to take on too much anyway, because the culture of business is fundamentally deeply broken
As far as I can tell, there has been no point since the invention of factories and metrics at which this has not been true, the rule rather than the exception among the entire classes of owners and high-level managers. And what's worse is that often competent ones of these can get some clout by delivering results by realizing this, but as more of them are added to the decision-making process, their ability to resist this tide, either socially or through direct loss of power, diminishes