This month I want to highlight an article, The Worst Programmer I Know, by Dan North. The article title is facetious, of course, however this article touches on a very real issue – metrics are imperfect approximations of the real world. British statistician George Box famously said “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” This quote speaks to a core human behavior: we are prone to creating models to describe the world around us. These models can be very useful, but they never perfectly capture real world complexities, and thus we must be confident in every model’s inherent wrongness.

In this article, the wrong model is a developer productivity measurement. The model did not effectively capture an engineer’s impact because that engineer was focused on keeping the machine running smoothly instead of their personal productivity. However, a wrong takeaway would be to avoid models altogether; models can be extremely useful in simplifying the world around us, and help us making decisions with high speed and sufficient accuracy. This article serves as a reminder that our models do not tell a complete story. Instead, we should use models as decision aids, and recognize our need for additional context as our models demonstrate weakness.

https://dannorth.net/the-worst-programmer

“Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.”