The Focusing Illusion of Developer Productivity

The Focusing Illusion of Developer
Productivity

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Carbon Five
@carbonfive
Partner and Technical Lead @ Carbon Five
@chemphill
courtney@carbonfive.com
Courtney Hemphill

“The focusing illusion is a cognitive bias that occurs
when people place too much importance on one aspect
of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting
the utility of a future outcome”
Focusing Illusion
@chemphill

😀 66%
How happy are you? ➤ How many dates?
@chemphill
1 Strack, Martin, Schwarz, Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments
of life satisfaction, 1988

@chemphill
How many dates? ➤ How happy are you?
😫 12%
1 Strack, Martin, Schwarz, Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments
of life satisfaction, 1988

@chemphill
2 Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, Stone, Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?
A Focusing Illusion 2006

@chemphill 3 Kahneman,Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011

@chemphill
Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1856-1915)
• Standardization (speed-and-feed slide rules)
• Time and motion studies (Frank & Lillian Gilbreth)
• Gantt charts (Henry Gantt)
• Wage incentives
• Statistical methods, quality assurance and quality
control
• > Fordism, Lean, Agile

The Bad
@chemphill
• Mechanistic and inhuman
• Eugenics
• Skills and initiatives are controlled by management
• False dichotomy of craft and business
• Efficiency over creativity
* standard, mechanistic, inflexible, and precise

@chemphill
CC @ https://thearsenalonthecharles.com/
4 Watertown Arsenal Strike, 1911

@chemphill
Cork Walgreen
(1935-2016)
• CEO of Walgreens 1971 - 1998
• $1/share in 1975 > $562/share in 2000
• Aligned leaders around mission for
convenience
• Won the game by changing the metric from
profit per store to profit per customer visit
• Dominated major competitors (Eckerd)

@chemphill
Wells Fargo (Gr-eight initiative)
(Jan 2011 - July 2015)
• Internal goal: at least eight financial products per
customer
• District managers discussed daily sales for each
branch and employee "four times a day, at 11 am, 1
pm, 3 pm and 5 pm.
• Turned a blind eye when ethical and even legal
lines were crossed
• "cutthroat" environment that caused employees to
fear for their job and make "bad ethical choices."
• 190,000 accounts w/ fraudulent fees, $3.5M fake
accounts, $185 million in fines
• Fired 5,300 employees

@chemphill
Indra Nooyi
(2006-2018)
• CEO of PepsiCo
• Revenue $35B-> $63.5 billion
• Share price nearly doubled
• Mission: making healthier foods &
protecting the planet
• Employee initiated net zero potato chip
plant
• PepsiCo's shares have gained 19.45% for
the last twelve months and 49.20% for the
last five years, compared to 15.75% and
22.13% for Coca-Cola.
5 Saﬁan, Fortune, “It’s Got To Be A Passion, It’s Gotta Be Your Calling”: Indra Nooyi, 2014

Overemphasis on Highly Visible Behaviors
@chemphill
• Bugs
• Test Coverage
• Function points
CC @ dilbert.com

Measurement Myopia
@chemphill
Mandate > Metric to meet the Mandate > Focus on Metric >
Developers spend their time figuring out how to measure that
metric
Is this the best method of working towards the goal??

Incentivizing Ownership
(Renters don't take pride in their homes. Only homeowners do.)
Scoping out
@chemphill

Work that has a real or perceived value that meets a demand.
Ownership / no need to get permission from a higher power
Safety / there are a certain amount of protections put into place
to ensure safety and security are guaranteed
Information / free access to information that is relevant to that
market
Market Economies
@chemphill

Supply of work that has a real or perceived value that meets a
demand.
Ownership
@chemphill

Supply of work that has a real or perceived value that meets a
demand.
• Assets
• Motive of self-interest
• Freedom of decision
Ownership
@chemphill

Collective (agile) > Weak > Strong
@chemphill
• Strong / limited situations (code spikes, specialized small module, never?)
• Weak / not always intentional & can deteriorate into non-ownership
• Collective / collectively owned, but responsibilities and schedules are
clear. Each team member can work across subsystems or services as
needed
6 Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeOwnership.html

The people who have done the most work on a piece of code are the ones who make the fewest mistakes.
@chemphill
Code Quality
7 Patanamon Thongtanunam ; Shane McIntosh ; Ahmed E. Hassan ; Hajimu Iida
Revisiting Code Ownership and Its Relationship with Software Quality in the Scope of Modern Code Review

Lockean Proviso
@chemphill
“…custom places an obligation on the owner/dictator to credit contributors
fairly (through, for example, appropriate mentions in README or history files).
In terms of the Lockean property model, this means that by contributing to a
project you earn part of its reputation return (positive or negative).
8 Copyright © 2000 Eric S. Raymond, Homesteading the Noosphere
BDFL - “enough and as good for others”

Agency
@chemphill
Control/Risk
Agency
Low variance,
well understood,
small project
(waterfall)
OSS, direct
access to
customers,
tight feedback
loops
Amazing,
requires A++
communication
and lots of trust
Failure and
attrition

Product Vision
@chemphill
• Access to business fundamentals
• Customer context and empathy
• Working the warehouse
• Rotating on customer service calls
• Internal customers
• Internal tooling teams, API teams
• Full stack experience to gain empathy

9 cc Product Dartboard @ https://www.productdartboard.com@chemphill

A protected, level playing field
Safety
@chemphill

First Principles
@chemphill
• Sufficiently general
• Publicly promulgated (published)
• Prospective (i.e., applicable only to future behavior, not past)
• At least minimally clear and intelligible
• Free of contradictions
• Relatively constant, so that they don't continuously change from day to day
• Possible to obey
• Administered in a way that does not wildly diverge from their obvious or apparent
meaning.
“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”
10 Lon Luvois Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964)

Reversible Risk
@chemphill
• Testing + Code standards
• PR reviews (done well)
• Blameless post-mortems
• QA environments where breaking things is totally allowed and encouraged
• Deploys that go out a little bit at a time
• Roll back a deploy easily
• Notifications and alerts (monitoring)
• Observability (proactive)
Make it easy to do the right thing rather than hard to do the wrong thing

Without information, we fall to system 1 thinking
Information
@chemphill

Communication Strategy
@chemphill
“People are communicating beings, doing best face-to-face, in person, with real-time question and answer.”
11 Cockburn, Agile Software Development, 2001

Communication Effectiveness
@chemphill
12 Ambysoft 2008 Agile Principles and Practices survey

Visibility
@chemphill
• Clear concise power point wins over extensive documentation
• Tell them, tell them what you told them, tell them again (military)
• Tell people what you're working on (13 Julia Evans)
• Dashboards, metrics, easy access to observe ability and monitoring tools
• To prevent collaboration from killing you, small units that do a few things well and
expose good APIs and/or contracts
There is a half-life to communication.

@chemphill
“Emerson conceived of an organic
organization where efficiency was a
natural occurrence, not an imposed set
of targets and procedures”
- Witzel, Morgen"A short history of
efficiency." Business Strategy Review (2002)

carbonﬁve.com
Thanks!
courtney@carbonfive.com
@chemphill

@chemphill
1. Strack, Martin, Schwarz, Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments of life
satisfaction, 1988
2. Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, Stone, Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion, 2006
3. Kahneman,Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011
4. Watertown Arsenal Strike
5. Safian, Fortune, “It’s Got To Be A Passion, It’s Gotta Be Your Calling”: Indra Nooyi, 2014
6. Martin Fowler https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeOwnership.html
7. Patanamon Thongtanunam ; Shane McIntosh ; Ahmed E. Hassan ; Hajimu Iida, Revisiting Code Ownership and Its
Relationship with Software Quality in the Scope of Modern Code Review
8. Eric S. Raymond, Homesteading the Noosphere, 2000
9. Product Dartboard @ https://www.productdartboard.com
10. Lon Luvois Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964)
11. Cockburn, Agile Software Development, 2001
12. Ambysoft 2008 Agile Principles and Practices survey
13. Tell people what you are working on, Julia Evans
References

Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
developer-efficiency-diverse-teams/

The Focusing Illusion of Developer Productivity

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