> when Kickstarter ran its unionizing campaign it turns out one of their demands was no productivity tracking software!

This is naive. Any ticket tracking system can be used to track productivity. And if you don’t have a ticket tracking system to organize work, that’s a miserable environment to work in.

But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this. I like this minimum. I don’t need a union to perfectly solve the problem of micromanagement but I can happily pay portions of my salary towards minimum standards of workplace environment.

Yeah 100% as a union you'd have a bit more power to negotiate a range of things with your employer, and many of them are pretty minor and even cheap. Thinking back to some previous jobs I had, the things that hurt us weren't salary related, but things like:

- as you said, productivity tracking through arbitrary means (in our case it was an arbitrary "story points completed per developer per month" measurement used to rank us)

- expectations around overtime (it was common to be asked to work evenings and weekends, you were remunerated at 1.5x or 2x but expected to do so if asked and singled out if you didn't)

- developers being frozen out of the requirements process (senior devs were begging to be allowed to spend time with the analysts, but prevented from doing so by someone in the management hierarchy, I think someone in charge of analysts)

- work-from-home (this was pre-covid, but there was an expectation that you'd be in the office unless you had an extremely good reason to and it was begrudgingly permitted)

Fighting for improvements in these areas individually is near-futile, but when you've organized yourselves management have to decide whether some very minor things are really worth pissing their entire, expensive-to-hire development team for.

If it used ticket-points instead of LoC, would that be OK? If it used “a fault-free oracle who told you a perfect measure of value created”, would that be OK?

I’m trying to figure out if you’re opposed to terrible approximations of productivity or to making performance distinctions among engineers.

I’m opposed to bullshit metrics to measure performance, lol. I don’t see how you can interpret my statement otherwise I’m good faith. I’m merely pointing out that at the very least the Kickstarter union was able to limit the degree of that particular bullshit.

There are people who are opposed only to the use of bullshit metrics and others who are opposed to all forms of metrics in performance appraisals.

Some of it comes down to having a seat at the table in deciding what metrics can and should be used. Obviously there needs to be some way to evaluate developers (whether it's subjective or objective), but particularly when they're negotiating collectively, it's reasonable for developers to have some say in this. Their interests are also aligned in making sure that the ranking reflects skill rather than something arbitrary.

> But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this

A middle manager is not allowed to use git?

This and maybe not getting corralled into working ticket after ticket and sprint after sprint...endlessly.

I have had numerous jobs in IT, and software development is by far the worst. Ticket grinding bullshit.

The sad part is that developers think this is how software development is so they can't even demand better. Clueless.

Lots of developers apparently WANT to do this though, when they belittle all the "soft skills and politics" that they feel are inferior to writing code. The irony is when the machines take over they'll start with executing the carefully defined instructions on all these tickets, while the last humans around will be the ones defining the requirements and hasing out the intent.