The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

2 Sep 2023 4 mins productivity metrics The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team. A few years ago I wrote a Twitter/X thread about the best programmer I know, which I should write up as a blog post. It seems only fair to tell you about the worst one too. His name is Tim Mackinnon and I want you to know how measurably unproductive he is. We were working for a well-known software consultancy at a Big Bank that decided to introduce individual performance metrics, “for appraisal and personal development purposes”. This was cascaded through the organisation, and landed in our team in terms of story points delivered. This was after some considered discussion from the department manager, who knew you shouldn’t measure things like lines of code or bugs found, because people can easily game these. Instead we would measure stories ... Read full article.