Remote: Only
Willing to relocate: No. We have very deep roots here.
Technologies: C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, various front end javascript frameworks, RabbitMQ
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamwgant/
Email: [email protected]
Feel free to check out my podcast for more info: https://CompleteDeveloperPodcast.com
https://completedeveloperpodcast.com/episode-190/
tldl; I used to be painfully shy and now I have a weekly podcast, speak at conferences, and am pretty outgoing. I start out with a discussion of some of the things that made me reluctant to engage with other people socially and then follow up with some strategies I used to get past them.
Greetings,I've been recently pondering my career options. I've been doing .NET since the beta. I've worked at a wide range of companies. However, in the last 4 years or so, I've started shifting my focus more with a desire towards helping smaller, scrappier companies handle scaling and finding product/market fit. I'm also one of the guys on The Complete Developer Podcast...
Remote: Very strongly preferred. We have deep roots here, and Nashville traffic is worse every day.
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, RabbitMQ, Entity Framework, NHibernate, Dapper (I'm strong in all these, but adaptable to most any approach on the .NET stack especially, as I've been using it since the beta).
Résumé/CV: My LinkedIn page covers the day job stuff pretty well (https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamwgant/). However, I'm also half of a reasonable sized software development podcast (Complete Developer Podcast - https://completedeveloperpodcast.com/), which we've been doing weekly for almost 4 years. In addition to that, I have a book coming out through APress in August, and have done a number of conference talks and the like. I'm really wanting to either 1) get involved with a more scrappy, smaller company that doesn't consider software a cost center, or 2) get into a role that includes more writing, teaching, and mentoring of developers in addition to just coding.
Email: [email protected]
Cycle time measurement would be wonderful. But that would seem to require 1) a reliable and fast build/QA/Release pipeline and 2) either consistent-sized "chunks" of work or a weighting factor. We're working on getting the former right, and the latter seems like it could be gamed in either direction.
Another issue that comes up is how do you deal with KPIs impacting salary when your environment trends towards chaos? For instance, if you have a big client who must be pleased - should they find something that displeases them, it could easily pull people off of other work until they are happy again. If KPIs are based on cycle time, now developers are being penalized simply because the client exists and has more leverage than the development team.
I'm wondering if KPIs are the answer, rather than simply having rewards at milestones.
One concern I have with a KPI-based approach is how to deal with efficiency improvements. Say the team figures out how to double the amount of work they can reasonably do in a sprint (for example). Now that's the new baseline, so now it becomes harder to improve one's personal KPIs to stand out. Done badly, the team ends up caught under a productivity asymptote and feels less motivated rather than more.
Another concern with individual KPIs is how they can sometimes cause the team not to work together. A senior dev under a bad KPI system might be incentivized not to mentor and support the junior devs, because doing so damages their KPIs in favor of the juniors.
Team-based KPIs can lead to resentment too, as some team members won't carry their weight and will end up being resented.
I've really been thinking about this a lot lately and the harder I look, the fewer answers I have that might be correct. Thank you for responding and thanks to OP for asking the original question - it comes at a perfect time for me.
https://completedeveloperpodcast.com/episode-175/
We didn't get into all of them, but covered a lot of them.