It’s a picture of the people who submit zero value comment spelling fixes to the Linux kernel so they can claim “I’ve submitted X patches to the Linux kernel” for KPIs or resume building
“Hey Bob, you’ve worked on the Linux kernel before, can you handle this CPU scheduler problem we’re having? Shouldn’t take you too long. We need it done before lunch”
Hey man, I once had an engineering exec (who didn’t last very long) who decided engineers would be stack ranked by SLOC. You can imagine how easy that metric was to cheese, and you can also imagine exactly how that policy turned out.
Give an engineer a stupid metric to meet, and they’ll find a stupid way to meet it for you, if only out of malicious compliance.
I’d have a field day with that. Max line length 70 or 75, excessively verbose function and variable names, triple the normal amount of comments, extra whitespace wherever possible, tab width 8, etc. The possibilities are endless for that metric.
It’s a picture of the people who submit zero value comment spelling fixes to the Linux kernel so they can claim “I’ve submitted X patches to the Linux kernel” for KPIs or resume building
“Hey Bob, you’ve worked on the Linux kernel before, can you handle this CPU scheduler problem we’re having? Shouldn’t take you too long. We need it done before lunch”
“Nah I was in the network driver section”
“oh nice we’re also having issues with random packets being dropped, can you look into that? It’s business critical”
Listen bub, I don’t have time for this Mickey mouse bullshit!
Hey man, I once had an engineering exec (who didn’t last very long) who decided engineers would be stack ranked by SLOC. You can imagine how easy that metric was to cheese, and you can also imagine exactly how that policy turned out.
Give an engineer a stupid metric to meet, and they’ll find a stupid way to meet it for you, if only out of malicious compliance.
I’d have a field day with that. Max line length 70 or 75, excessively verbose function and variable names, triple the normal amount of comments, extra whitespace wherever possible, tab width 8, etc. The possibilities are endless for that metric.
Dude… Just write a python script that makes small changes to white space every few seconds and commits them.
When metrics become targets they fail to be metrics any more
Campbell’s law goes brrrrr.
Oh, you contributed to the kernel? Name every commit SHA.