When I'm having off-weeks, I'm painfully aware of them. It causes me a lot of personal stress and anxiety. My manager is like you and never calls me out of it during our standups. He may ping me and ask how I'm doing, etc. I'm glad he doesn't call me out on it because that would just amplify my anxiety and probably make things worse.
You're right, after a week, maybe two, I get right back on the horse and manage to catch up.
People wanna feel safe... And go figure, when they do their output usually goes from being minimal effort to above and beyond. Also feeling safe has sooooo many more institutional benefits etc. Errors are identified + corrected quicker, people don't play politics near as much, things just get "easier"... hard to explain.
But yea - definitely give that guy some positive feedback in your 1:1's. That was one thing that helped me really design a system that people wanted to work within, solid feedback when things work/didn't work =)
He put -1998 lines on his daily email?
And I think that hits to the core of Goodhart's law:
""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.""
This story came up often when I said I read the commits daily. I would just roll my eyes and say "I read code, I don't look at arbitrary LOC".
If the story is true it shows incompetence with the managers to pick such an arbitrary metric to measure with. Plus, when you start policing people like this you can damn-near guarantee motivation goes in the trashcan because now it's a "me vs. you" thing... and eww who wants to come to work with THAT?!
Thank you for finding it.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I learned quick to not make assumptions, and to hire/retain people who I could trust... I also requested informal reports ever 48hrs or so with links to what you'd been working on, PR's, documentation, etc. Reports were sent to a distro list of all team members and replaced traditional stand-ups. So generally if I was in the dark it would all be figured out in due time without having to get up someone's butt. I feel like it kept everyone accountable and transparent when everything was in writing.
Also with ramp-up specifically... since I was paying attention to the hard metrics I started to get a feel for when something was difficult vs. easy. Projects that would kick people down for simple tasks would get priority for refactor, difficult onboarding was usually met with aggressive documentation, etc. Over time you got a taste of what these beasts were without even being an IC on them.
The truth is you need near-100% understanding of the code going into the product to really gauge someone's participation accurately. Looking at LOC, # of commits, etc. is all fluid so while they describe properties of the story, they're not the actual story itself.
Also, there's up and down weeks. I've watched my top performers have poop weeks where they've only been able to crank out a couple of small features, or maybe just resolved one issue, etc. I feel like if micro-managers saw this they'd put the hurt on em... for me it literally never came up because within 1-2 weeks they'd be back on the rails. I was always like "huh - musta been some human stuff." Or, heck... sometimes I could tell they just moved a bit slower on more mundane tasks. When I put myself in a position to relate to that I find that I have the same lulls, lack of motivation for mundane work, etc.
People NOT getting back on the rails after 1-2 weeks of meh was the exception! I also felt like I could demand more of my team during the 2-3 crank-it-out periods that inevitably occurred throughout the year because I had respected their time leading up to that... IDK.
All-in-all if specs were being respected, code was clean/reasonably PR'd, deadlines were hit, and meetings were well prep'd for + attended I felt that we were being successful.