Alex Ptakhin

How to Survive, Influence, and Improve Quality Materials Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/aptakhin/ BSky: bsky.app/profile/aptakhin.name Slides: Kanban: Dragan Stepanović - Async Code Reviews Are Choking Your Company’s Throughput youtube.com/watch?v=vUUFdMwZWaI

In almost all managerial interviews, I was asked about team metrics: How do I know the team is working well? I usually didn’t answer cheerfully. So, questions about which metrics are less harmful to examine and which should not be used as targets often occupy my mind. Naturally, there will be the classic Goodhart’s law here, ‘When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.’ And Deming’s quote, simultaneously, ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure.’ And, oops, he didn’t say it; he meant something else. In a complex system, if something can be measured, we eventually look only at what is being measured and change it. However, there are some internal teams that may want ambitious numbers about what they’ll achieve in Q2. The teams are about process improvement: introducing research where there wasn’t any, avoiding launching what was bad research into development, and so on.

I’ve often had anxiety light bulbs go off after technical conferences. People were discussing open source, so why am I not doing open source? Everyone is doing Open Source; what am I doing? Or all managers should be generally incompetent and not be stupid in processes or hires. This is all partially true—maybe even the industry is in a bad state. Everything needs improvement, rationalization, and communication. And someone like going to make it better, and people are resisting. So I fight, I fight the system, and the result is self-esteem issues, health issues, burnout, and maybe depression if I push harder. And people looks are annoying too. Many things are taken personally, causing frustration and suppressed anger. The questions involve anxiety and safety. I’m a bad leader or employee if I’m not doing something.

Recently, I came across a book about working with low performers, and this topic is discussed in team lead chats. Here’s a person who performs poorly, does tasks slowly or incorrectly, and maybe someone else doesn’t like the communication. So we put him on a Performance Improvement Plan with some metrics, which, for some reason, we consider objective. And then the person improves or not. If not, then we part ways. If yes, he becomes inspired and motivated and continues performing like a steam locomotive! Probably. Let’s take a couple of steps back. The manager is responsible for the team processes. So let’s discuss what is happening with the processes and whether the person screwed up in them. What options do we have for this low performance? If a person performs well and then stops, then why?

Yesterday, the excellent speaker Veronika Ilina saved the weakening ex-speaker Alexander (me) at a meetup about hiring, onboarding and offboarding. A bit about hiring today. it’s not very difficult to make some weird stuff in hiring from my experience. Looking for one position, realize “something is not right” and start looking for another. Opening, changing requirements, closing positions without hiring. Yes, It is costly to hire! The time of the hiring manager and the recruiter, if any, and the time of the rest of the team in the interview. More stages are longer and more expensive. Onboarding is 1-3 months. Another plus one person on the communication map. Since it’s costly to hire, let’s optimize everything we can reach to make cheaper. So we’ve checked the direction and the strategy.

I told myself yesterday that I needed to write a post for tomorrow. I wrote down several drafts on different topics, but they weren’t finished, and the post had to happen. Over the past month, in the background of work and home, various frivolous activities have happened: While suggesting on meetup for the ‘hiring’ topic, added ‘and off-boarding,’ and now there will be a mini-talk for 10 minutes I composed limericks, a short poetry format with a punch at the end, trying to rhyme into a form in English. Remember how much I liked doing something with hokku at school Quest how to sign up for the university library, which is a tall building I used to observe from the city train. I got some fabulous, valuable books Ride roundtrip for a couple of hours to the library on the other side of town for another rare book.

After finishing Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming recently, I was left with questions about how and why. I agree with the ideas in the book, but there’s always this “but” that seems to undo everything before it. I can read many research papers about individual or group work, yet the resistance remains. From school to university and into the early years of work, we’re taught to focus on individual work—individual effort combined with social interaction. As we progress up the career ladder, social interaction becomes more important. But collective engineering practices, like those described in the book, promote something different. When we already have a tool in our toolbox, there’s no resistance to using it. It becomes a choice: I understand the limits of individual work, I understand the limits of group work, and I know the best contexts for each.

When I learned to drive, some of my teachers tended to repeat: “You are driving in the direction where you are looking.” But my other teachers told me it was incorrect. Yes, I will crash when my eyes are stuck on one object for a long time. But if my eyes don’t stick, I can drive almost 360 degrees from my view by changing the view angle constantly. I’m a slow driver. I do not react so fast, and sometimes, I lack certainty. I took many additional lessons after receiving my driver’s license, and through practice, I didn’t do counter emergency driving, though. Most weren’t about hard skills: “Look how I amazing avoided emergencies,” but more about “how I helped emergencies not to happen at all.” Even within this context, there were many dangerous situations.

When I scroll LinkedIn I’m definitely not ready to read carefully long reads. I opened one article with no images and no interaction. I couldn’t just start reading it. I wanted to scroll and consume it. I tried the exercise two more times, slowing down myself, and didn’t get through the first screen. I can complain a bit about the post-COVID health state, where reading any problematic reading is becoming especially tough. But more questions, of course, are to me that I need to slow down myself, carefully choosing what I am eating as food and information food, too. I’m still in the beginning of the way Vitaly Sharovatov recommended book “The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality.” I love everything, especially the first chapter, “The World Is Being Ruined by Best Efforts.

My understanding of DORA was about the four key metrics (Deployment frequency, Lead time for changes, Time to restore service, and Change failure rate). I didn’t understand why it should be relevant to my work. Why should these metrics be my Northstar? They don’t give me much value. I got a better idea with the nice podcast Dave Farley with DORA research co-creator Nicole Forsgren. The initial motivation was to link technical capital to company financial capital. This is more about building a bridge between engineers, non-technical founders, and managers using arguments and reasoning. I came to an understanding. If we have lower-than-high metrics, we should fix them. Around 80% of DORA respondents from 2022 answered that they did not have all high metrics. This is the main target audience because DORA also includes techniques to achieve better results.