Warren (00:07) Welcome back to another episode of Adventures in DevOps. And today, since last week went so well with talking about Dora 2025 report and everything related to AI, we've decided to drill down into just one specific piece of that. ⁓ what is that going to be? Productivity. I forgot, you know, being productive or effective. I'm actually not entirely sure what that is, but ⁓ because we're on that topic, I brought back Dorota, CEO at Authors. Dorota (00:37) Hi. So from what I understand, you don't know what we're going to talk about. That's a great start. No, from the notes that I have, ⁓ engineering productivity, I believe is the name of the game. I've been at one last conference at the end of the year, December, 2025, built stuff in Lithuania. And there were a few occasions where the topic came up and I feel like... This topic always comes up whenever you talk to engineers, especially the more senior ones. And to me, it seems like as an industry, we're just obsessed with productivity. And whenever there is a new technology coming up or like a new way of doing things, everyone starts talking about productivity. And obviously the whole AI topic came up and productivity is once again a key concern for lot of people. Warren (01:33) I don't think it's just the conference. think since AI has been a thing, I just continually hear productivity, productivity, productivity as if AI has any impact on it. I remember recently someone was saying AI increases your productivity, which wasn't a new thought because I've seen it on LinkedIn and other news streams recently. And the question that just keeps coming back to my mind is what exactly do they mean when they say productivity? How can AI increase something if they're not measuring anything? are measuring something, what is that? Dorota (02:05) Well, measuring, right? That's ⁓ something of a challenge because, and here's maybe my perennial problem. There's just no way to do that. ⁓ I feel like in software, everyone wants to measure productivity or output. ⁓ But so far, I don't think anyone has a way to actually do that. Warren (02:27) Well, I think in Scrum they talk about velocity. Dorota (02:30) Velocity, which is different. Velocity just tells you how many units of work as you defined you can do. Warren (02:40) Well, I think that's a fair metric, right? If everyone is talking about who talks about productivity is thinking about AI productivity and how much AI increases our productivity, I should say LLMs are increasing our productivity. The only metric that really can come to mind is a number of lines of code per unit time. That's like one-to-one with like engineering. Dorota (02:55) Yeah, that's... He said it, he said it, he thinks that engineering productivity is just the amount of code that you write. Warren (03:04) LLMs don't increase anything else on any other metric, right? So what else can I include? Dorota (03:10) First all, I don't want to talk about LLM. Let's shelf that discussion. There's too much of that everywhere. So here's the thing. Obviously the idea of productivity, the whole notion comes from manufacturing, right? And if you are a company manufacturing gizmos, then you can easily count how many gizmos you have after a certain amount of time, like per hour. Warren (03:36) widgets per unit time Dorota (03:39) So, and per machine, so, and that will tell you your productivity. And if you make tweaks to your process, or maybe you change a machine, then you can compare the new number to the old number. Then you can see, okay, this is better because we have more gizmos now. ⁓ It's not how it works in software. Warren (03:56) Why, maybe I'll take the other side of the perspective and disagree. Isn't the whole goal to deliver value to users or customers in which case you're delivering units of value and maybe units of value is features. so features per unit time turned out maybe that's. Dorota (04:11) Well, you made so many jumps here. So here's the thing. Value, yes. However, the whole problem boils down to how do you measure value? How do you capture that? Where is the value? mean, is feature the value? I don't know. ⁓ So like when you're manufacturing gizmos, gizmo is a unit. It's hopefully it's a thing that you can take in your hands and sell, right? In software, it is a little bit more vague, nebulous. It's just... I mean, I would argue if we are going to compare software to gizmos, then the whole software product is one gizmo, which, you know, it takes months, maybe years to make that. Warren (04:53) Some teams are definitely measuring number of products per unit time, right? I'm sure there are some product managers out there that instead of doing end user research and understanding what actually will bring value to the businesses or companies. Dorota (05:05) And here's the thing, unless you're making the same exact product the second time, it's going to be a different gizmo. So you can't really compare it. And that's the crux of the problem, I think. Software is inherently a creative discipline. You're always making things new that haven't been done before or haven't been done exactly like this before. So your gizmos that you're manufacturing are all different. Warren (05:31) productivity looks like in other domains. Like if we talk about creativity, I'm thinking like number of statues or works of art per unit time. Number of books maybe that writers write. Maybe that's a good comparison. Dorota (05:44) number of albums released yeah i mean you can totally look at some of the artists you know and you can tell this artist was more prolific than the other and then Warren (05:53) I think that's the word prolific because that came to my mind too, right? If you have prolific artists, they release a lot. But usually it's used in the same phrase as quality. they also achieved, and I don't know enough about the music domain, like lots of what is it? Platinum records, basically, or top of the chart. Dorota (06:10) Well, yeah, but you know, here's the thing. ⁓ Is that productivity? Warren (06:16) They were very productive. I sat down and I said, I had a very productive session. What did I mean? I recorded a lot of... Dorota (06:23) I have a feeling that the productivity thing is a lot like porn. I know it when I see it. Warren (06:30) Is Ruth Gators, ⁓ Ginsburg. Dorota (06:33) Yes, because I mean, how do you define it? No one can. I've talked to so many people over my 20-year career and no one ever can tell you exactly what productivity is. Warren (06:45) I think this is a lucid thing that you own that individual engineers only find when they're whole, like in a hole somewhere and no one's heard from them in weeks. Then they come back like, I was really productive or they leave the office, they come back the next day. I was super productive when I was sitting on a park bench somewhere that I've heard. Dorota (07:02) Yeah, so it's just a feeling and then, know, again, how do we measure and capture feelings? mean, some people do think, okay, we can totally do that. Warren (07:10) That's true. An engineer a couple of weeks ago told me that she was, how should I put this? We couldn't meet because she was being very productive. And then I learned later that what she had done was completely rewrite all of the software that they had because it was so much better, I quote. Dorota (07:31) After she rewrote it was so much better. Yeah, very productive. know, this is one of the things that has been, you know, going around in my head. I think the only reasonable way to measure productivity would be through revenue, right? Because that's the output that you can actually quantify. However, the problem is that's not engineering productivity because there's a lot more than just engineering that contributes to revenue. And we're back to square one. Okay. Is there anything to measure really? Warren (08:02) I just I feel like there are so many better metrics out there when we start looking at a business or product in a whole right you can look at and use our happiness not some bad metric like NPS score or anything like that but Dorota (08:13) Here's the thing, end user happiness only matters for some companies. There's a lot of companies for which the investor happiness is what fundamentally matters. the stock performance, then again, tie that back to engineering. Is there actually a correlation? You probably know the answer. Do you know the answer? Warren (08:32) see I well the correlation doesn't imply cause maybe the new metric is really when we say productivity what we mean is investor product I was super productive as in I did things that will make some investors happy Dorota (08:35) Still! Burger up! I really feel like there are so many steps in between the work that you do as engineer and that investor being happy that it's just not a practical way to think about this. I mean, I do like this idea of productivity as a feeling because fundamentally, I think that's what people are talking about when they talk ⁓ about Warren (09:09) I've got it. Maybe what they really mean is this is the subjective metric that engineers are using instead of saying, I'm happy. They say, I'm productive. And so if you're looking at an engineering organization, you say, yeah, we want happy engineers. well, that's what I've heard a lot is that we actually don't care about our engineering. I don't care about my engineers being happy, just that. Dorota (09:25) No one cares about that anymore Warren (09:34) I've heard people say they don't care about their engineers being happy. And even though we know all the research says that happier engineers produce higher quality stuff. And I think it's cyclical, right? If you're producing higher quality stuff, you're on call less time, which means you're probably happier because you don't you can actually go out and enjoy your evenings without, you know, waking up at 3 a.m. Dorota (09:56) But then your manager actually doesn't know if you did any job. they're like nothing ever, right? This is is maybe I Warren (10:02) Well, you were just you jumped. It was actually your talk at Vilnius. Dorota (10:07) I did, yes, I gave a talk that touches on this topic. I feel like this is part of the problem. ⁓ If you actually do a really good job in software, if you are, let's say, productive in the sense that you very efficiently deliver high value, so software that is super stable, doesn't have any bugs, it works exactly as everyone expects it from the get-go, then what happens? Nothing happens. Well, exactly, nothing happens, Like no one really pays attention. Does that count? Would, you know, whoever's measuring productivity, would that be captured? I don't know. Warren (10:46) Probably not. And I feel like I've never heard productivity actually being used on a team or org level. know like engineering productivity. I only ever hear it being applied at the individual contributor level. Like I never hear a product project manager come back. Like I was super productive. I scheduled all my meetings for the week. said maybe I sent all those emails actually, right? Dorota (11:06) You know what? I think you're not talking to the right people because I hear this all the time. ⁓ I managed to schedule all my meetings so that I get to, you know, it's basically just the calendar Tetris game. That's the favorite game of all project. Warren (11:20) we talk about productivity, maybe what we're really talking about is the toil and the waste. If you got through all of your toil, all of your waste, things that should not actually be done, then you are productive. Because those things don't inherently have any value for the business to begin with, Like scheduling a meeting has no value for the business. If we talk about it from a lean perspective, Dorota (11:40) But I don't think people think about that when they bring up productivity. Warren (11:44) Yeah, but as we identify and I really like it is that it's a subjective measure There is no metric behind it when someone says they're productive It's a feeling and on the flip side when our feelings relevant It's well when they don't have a metric that goes along with the business So the only things that are important for the business that can't be measured by those metrics are the waste The things that shouldn't be done in the first place Dorota (12:08) Well, some waste is necessary, arguably. Warren (12:10) Well, you know, I've worked at a bunch of companies and one of them was a global manufacturing company and they have to ship stuff to their customers and they would often tell me that in the spirit of lean that the box that items were shipped in was waste that means as it means it was just a mechanism to deliver the product to the customer and no one cares what the box looks like. However, in the last 10 years, I would want to challenge this actually in the last 10 years, we see that lots of companies have started branding their boxes. significantly that the box is an experience when you get a motherboard or a hard drive. Dorota (12:45) It's all because of those YouTube unboxing videos, I think that's the reason. And also if you have another surface to put your ad on, why wouldn't you do that? Warren (12:56) Well, I think it goes both ways. think the ad is a huge part of it. I think knowing who your audience is is important. Like if they're going to unbox it, they want a stellar experience. so having it there is important. I also feel like I don't want to have to open the box to see what's inside, right? So knowing what's there is important. I can get excited just by, you know, pulling up, know, walking in after getting off the. Dorota (13:16) Are you a cat? Are you excited about boxes? Warren (13:20) I just feel like those boxes are more flimsy than the dirty cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo on them. Dorota (13:25) or like the ones that are just playing cardboard. Those are the waste. The ones that were labeled waste. yeah, no, I see what you mean. ⁓ Anyway, ⁓ why should anyone care about productivity? mean, like individual engineers, right? Is it just a manager concept? Warren (13:38) was a sidetrack. Well, I've completely flipped this around because when we started this conversation where I was at was, yeah, no one should care about productivity whatsoever. It's not a real metric. It doesn't encapsulate anything important. There are business metrics that go forward and there are engineering metrics that are way more important. We talked about the DORA metrics last week. think DORA has been a thing for 10 years or so now. There's no reason not to adhere to these. There's also individual career lessons. Dorota (14:11) metrics do you mean exactly can you Warren (14:13) I Dorometrics, mean, mean time to resolution, change failure rate, you know how often there is a failure in production, deployment frequency, how many deployments per day you have and the change lead time, how long it takes to get software into production, into users hand from the moment you conceive of it. Dorota (14:29) Yeah. So yeah, so where does that leave productivity? That's really just the deficiency of the capital you have deployed, I think, isn't it? Warren (14:38) it may be well, I think I like efficiency as an interesting aspect there. But I think there's also something also included in that because when people talk about productivity, I think they also assume that people are completely utilized, 100 % capacity. Dorota (14:52) 100 % yes, 120 % that's when you know that people are really giving their all. ⁓ Yeah, I think that's another flawed concept. Warren (15:02) What do mean? Don't you want like, feel like there's a huge fight in engineering organizations where individuals should be performing their job for the length of time in which they're working. know, if they're working eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, Dorota (15:15) Yeah, because we're totally assembling gizmos on a manufacturing line. That's how it works, right? It's creative, right? It's thinking, so you cannot... Warren (15:23) But surely working longer produces more output, right? Dorota (15:27) You're trolling me. Warren (15:29) Let's assume for a moment that that were true. Dorota (15:32) Yeah, I mean, to be fair, for some people this is true. Like they absolutely have those spurts where they just sit at a computer 16 hours, like four hours of sleep, four hours, who knows. Warren (15:47) It's known in sports as being in the zone. You're in the zone. You're able to. Dorota (15:51) Known in engineering as being in a zone and ⁓ whatever it's just for some people they're in the zone for days and days and then they take vacation for three months. I'm I'm just I'm Warren (16:03) First they release the production and then they take vacation. Dorota (16:05) Yeah, and I'm speaking from Europe, just for our American listeners. Three months vacation does happen here sometimes. ⁓ Warren (16:15) especially if they've during that time. was this was this one example that I think you were working with, Dorota (16:20) yeah, I have a specific engineer in mind who did exactly that. He would just always pull in very long hours. I mean, he was a fairly good engineer, a great output, but then he would just take, would just batch his work and batch his vacation. And yeah, was, I mean, everyone else had to sort of adjust to that, it worked for him. so for majority of people though, we do need some time to just think. And if you're working, mean, does thinking count as work time? I mean, the problem is with thinking, you can't necessarily schedule it. At least I can't. Maybe some people can. I can't. It just happens when I'm... Warren (17:04) I wouldn't say I scheduled it, there are ways, after a while of working in the, I always say creative knowledge workspace, you do know when the thinking happens. It's usually in that four-walled cell in your house that usually has no windows. The bathroom. When you're in the shower, a lot of great thoughts come to you, right? And I think it's because you can't be in front of your keyboard. You can't actually be typing on it. You can't be engaging. So your mind starts to wander. Dorota (17:35) Never once had a cool thought in a shower. No, is when I just, shower is when my brain just goes off completely. No cancel. However, like on the way to outside basically, to my grocery shopping or whatever, ⁓ which is I suppose similar. Like I'm not in front of my machine. I'm not in my normal working environment. That's when things come to me. So on the train. Nowadays I work from home so I don't commute as much, but that I remember back when I did, that was like super valuable time. had like my best ideas sitting on a train, just eyes and mind wandering, looking through the window. Warren (18:18) Is there something special about the Swiss flora fauna that trigger? Dorota (18:24) think so, think it's just that our trains are comfortable and peaceful. Everyone's on their phones! ⁓ Warren (18:28) Thank you. But that's interesting. mean, there's nothing to disturb you. So coming back to the original idea, maybe it is that productivity is subjective. The one thing that I could potentially be, someone could argue a counterpoint that someone could use against that would be maybe it's the ratio of value added work time versus non-value added work time. Dorota (18:54) That is an interesting way to put it. I do think that there's something in there definitely because no one likes doing what they perceive as non-value added work. And it does feel good if you've done a chunk of work without the toil or without the waste. However, again, individual productivity, the subjective productivity, that feeling, that good feeling that I have, does that matter in the end? Warren (19:21) Well, you could argue it's akin to efficiency then, right? If an engineer spends five hours working and in that time four hours of it is dealing with the IDE, getting the theme colors just exactly the way I want them and one hour actually typing code out and delivering, obviously not including any of time I had to think, but literally just typing on the keyboard, you could argue that I was only 20 % efficient, right? Dorota (19:46) Well, I don't know. What was the code that you wrote? What did that do? Because I actually don't care about engineers typing on their keyboard. Whatever. And I don't even care about the code that comes out. I care about the business problem solved. And the best engineers that I've worked with, don't write a lot of code. They spend a lot of time maybe thinking about maybe some of them absolutely spend a lot of time tweaking their IDE colors. Whatever what happens in that black box, none of my concern. However, in the end, they write a single line of code what it needs to happen. I I do think that ⁓ simple solutions take often the most time to think about, but then they're also the most long lived ones. And then if I zoom out, because again, I actually don't care about individuals. I I do care about them as people, but... ⁓ In a sense, in a business sense, I don't care about individuals. care about the whole team, the whole business. So I actually, I'm in this fantastic position that I don't have to care. No, no, actually I don't know. ⁓ yeah, but that's the thing. Individual productivity. I don't know. Warren (20:50) investors. I think you do care about the investors. Dorota (21:08) How important is that beyond, okay, does this person feel good? If they feel good, then maybe they will work better. then, talking about investors, that gave me this other idea that I wonder if this collective obsession with productivity actually comes from that Silicon Valley ⁓ startup world where you are not profitable, yet you have to have... some numbers to show for investors to say, okay, you know what, this is great. Your money has been put to good use and productivity is one of those metrics that can be gained easily. can be just completely cooked up. Although I'm not saying that everyone's lying. I'm just saying that you can totally stretch the truth or even see what you want to see. Warren (22:02) is just Silicon Valley though it makes me think of any sort of culture that believes the output is important that they're very task oriented in nature. And this is an idea from there's a book and maybe that will be my pick for the episode, which really talks about some cultures really focus on or are task oriented versus ones that are maybe high level oriented or or think more about the bigger picture or society as a whole. And I think there are and Silicon Valley definitely falls into the task oriented nature where the doing is important. The being in the seat and typing on the keyboard is important compared to the value delivery is actually important because I really like your perspective where if you, code that you may be writing, even if you say, yes, we eliminated all the toil in the software development activity, that's gone. But the code that you write is now doing stuff that no one asks for actually causes tech debt be added to the product. Dorota (23:00) just upgraded to that newest framework version. It's so much better. We just migrated to, I mean, insert your favorite framework here. I mean, it happened so many times. Was that worth it? I don't know. mean, again. Warren (23:15) Well then afterwards you hear, since we upgraded I feel so much more productive now than I did when we were using that old one. Dorota (23:22) And from my perspective, every single one of those cases, I actually did not observe any significant impact on the level of the whole team or like how fast our customer requests were handled. Warren (23:35) Did you promote anyone for working on that project? No. So the project wasn't valuable for an individual, the project wasn't valuable for the business, so we did it, we did it, why did we do it? And also, but the engineer felt productive. Dorota (23:48) Yeah, exactly. That's the problem with productivity as a subjective measure, right? Sometimes you need to let engineers do whatever makes them happy, as long as it's not harmful. And I think in those cases, it wasn't harmful. whatever. Warren (24:03) I think there is a point where if you're on an old enough version, sometimes you do want to introduce some new bug feature ⁓ into your technology, new aspect for your customer. And it's exceedingly difficult with the solution that you have in place. And so you want to change something. Dorota (24:19) I'm not saying that upgrading to the whatever framework, changing frameworks is bad. No, no, obviously it depends. I was just bringing up that as an example of just because the engineer felt productive. ⁓ Warren (24:31) That's the point, right? Don't do it just because whatever arbitrary reason there has to be a benefit to the product, right? Dorota (24:38) Yeah, and maybe this is just a matter of me being biased just because of the place I'm in. do think unless it is important for the customer, unless the customer will pay money for this, it doesn't matter. Warren (24:52) Yes, for sure. You're biased. You have a need for there to be a purpose actual valuable reason for doing it Honestly, I do think that there is value in Individuals engineers are not taking time away in their day to do work-related activities which don't directly add to the bottom line if it does make them feel better or engage more with technology or the company Yeah, no Dorota (24:58) Yeah, I guess, yeah. But again, I would not call that productivity. Just, you know, call it something else. But maybe it's okay if in software it's not, it wouldn't be the first time when we took a word that means something for the rest of the world. And we said, no, no, no, it means something completely different for us. Warren (25:33) Yeah, no, that definitely happens a lot. I brought it up because of your analogy to manufacturing where you don't want to run stuff at 100 % capacity all the time because break and you need normal maintenance, right? Dorota (25:47) Right. No, no, no. So I agree. I would never chase that hundred percent. That's just outright stupid. aren't machines, first of all, and even machines need their breaks. I mean, you could argue, oh, the humans get breaks, right? They don't work 24 hours a day. But I'd say if every single one of your working hour is accounted for, then you don't have that freedom or that space to think. And that to me is an equivalent of a Preventive maintenance for a human. Anyway, I don't want to go too far into a- Warren (26:22) Well, I mean, I think that's interesting, though, because one of the things we're saying here is that you really need to focus on providing that capacity available in order to have downtime to think because even not thinking explicitly, your subconscious will wake up and start working on problems for you, extending and sometimes maybe your subconscious is more intelligent than your conscious. Dorota (26:45) definitely it is. Yeah, I know better than to ignore my... Yes. Another thing that sort of bothers me about this whole productivity obsession, which is this sort of hidden assumption that the higher number is better and that you should expect that it gets better over time, which is super dangerous because, I mean, that's not how it works. Warren (26:49) Dreams. Dorota (27:11) Unless you keep changing the rules of the game. I'll take a stable system over a peaky system or any day. Warren (27:21) I think like a simple formula which goes up over time in a sustainable way is better than one with high volatility and low predictability. Dorota (27:30) Yeah, so that's another problem. And I'm trying to figure out how to sort of put it in words, because this is an experience which I think is sort of hard to translate unless you've lived through that. I have been lucky enough to have worked with or on teams who had achieved that sort of stable, sustainable pace where things are just working smoothly, where there are no, there's no drama, no interpersonal issues. They just deliver work. The customers are happy, they get feedback and all of that. And those environments were super stable, which means there was none of that roller coaster of emotions or anticipation and then something big happened and then you had to deal with a lot of issues in a short amount of time. And so if things are stable and steady, even if you're moving super fast, you don't feel it. Warren (28:29) It's like high velocity is you can't feel it, right? Exactly. you're going on a plane or a train versus standing. Dorota (28:35) As long as things are stable. And when I look back and try to sort of keep in mind the subjective idea of productivity, back in those days, I don't think I felt that much productive because things were stable. So there were no peaks and valleys. It was always the same. So if I take that subjective lens, then was I productive? I don't know. Did it feel good? It felt okay. However, when I look at the output of the whole team, like, The business outcomes, they were fantastic. And on the other hand, were times when I've worked with teams who had a lot of surrounding problems, a lot of interpersonal conflicts, like lack of clarity when it comes to division and all of that. There were those peaks and valleys and there were moments where you could ask them and say, yes, we are productive right now. Yet, if you look at the bigger picture, the business outcomes, not the best. Warren (29:31) And that's the subjective productivity coming in. Like we were productive despite everything else. Yeah. And the way you talk about it at the team level makes me think of like the four stages of any organization, right? You've got the org. Dorota (29:42) Norming, storming, performing? Is that what you mean? Forming, norming, storming, performing. Warren (29:47) It's forming, storming, norming, performing. Dorota (29:52) Something like that. you know that some of the teams will go through those cycles and they jump things out of order Warren (29:58) Of course, same like with the five stages of grief, right? But I think the interesting thing most most interesting about that is that it not only that doesn't necessarily go in order, but every single change that happens in any way causes the team to repeat the process. It's not like once a team is. Dorota (30:00) Yeah, they don't go in. so when we've upgraded to that latest framework, you say we're going to go through all the stages. Warren (30:21) Yeah, of course, right? Things are different in some way and the team needs to get into that problem space, understanding the new environment that they're working in now and push forward. And I think there's an interesting thing at the team level when I say performing that closely mimics what I think people want to say is productivity. Well, I don't know, they sound similar. They both start with P. Dorota (30:42) to me. Well, I have a lot of other words that start with P and have nothing to do with productivity. I mean, something that I keep... You're going with that. I don't know where I'm going with that. This is the thing that I also keep coming back. On one hand, I hear a lot of people talking about productivity, productivity, engineer productivity, so important. But then I also hear a lot of engineers who's like, why should I care? This is the management stuff. This is just fluff. Why are we even talking about this? Part of me thinks like, yeah, well, you should, this is all nonsensical, subjective, real metric. But there is part of that that I feel like everyone should care about, which is how do know you're successful? And you should care about that because, I mean, you as an individual may think, okay, I'm just going to write good code. Everything's going to be fine. Well, no. How does your manager know that you should keep your job if the layoffs are coming? How, you know... Warren (31:38) How do you get? Dorota (31:41) How do you ever get promoted? You may say, I don't care about that. But yes, you do. You do. Your salary depends on that and all that. Warren (31:50) think it's a good thing to quickly dive into because I have heard that pretty frequently, obviously way more before the last five years when things were way more hectic, ⁓ volatile and where companies weren't still laying people off. I think there is a question of what does matter. Dorota (32:08) Well, you need to at least be able to convey what is the value that you're providing to the company, simply so that you keep your job. You may assume, okay, my manager knows. Sometimes they do. Sometimes, I mean, they may create their own story. Warren (32:23) Do they? Have you had a manager who's like, know everything you're doing and that you should be promoted based off of your good work? Dorota (32:29) Of course, but was that, that, so they sometimes they did that. However, their story was not necessarily the same as the reality. Yeah. Like most of us do. I do think it makes sense to care. I mean, if it's your first year of the, the job after university, sure, whatever you can ignore that. But after that, you actually need to start caring at least how your company, how your manager sees this productivity. Warren (32:38) They had their own version. Dorota (32:57) Because they will have some definition of that and some way of measuring or not measuring it and you need to see how you are able to fit into that. Warren (33:07) Yeah, so my counter argument always was if you are standing still and everything else is moving ahead, then you are by interrelation falling behind. Dorota (33:16) Yeah, which is, you know, especially right now, these days, it's important because more and more companies are starting to employ the stack ranking when deciding. God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's back. It's back. mean, arguably some companies never dropped this practice. I mean, I don't know if everyone knows what I'm talking about. It's when you are doing the dreaded performance management, you usually rate your employees or your team on a certain scale. And some companies believe that. You cannot give everyone a 5 out of 5. You have to sort of... some of them have to be worse, some of them have to be better, and it has to fit a bell curve. Now this is obviously nonsensical, that's not how this works, especially if you have a high bar and high ring that Warren (34:00) If anyone has ever employed Outsourcers, you definitely know you can give them all one star. Dorota (34:06) Right. And this is the funny part. I don't think any company has a problem with you giving everyone one star because they, hey, we can let them all go. But, but that's the thing, like these days more and more companies force managers, even those managers who are wise and know that this is nonsensical, they're still forced to use that sort of approach. Warren (34:27) I heard a good reason for that in some companies though. They acknowledged that not just all of their managers in the entire company, but even their leadership team was so bad at evaluating when to hire and fire people that statistically there must be people who are at the bottom of the stack. stack rank them and then let those go because they must be bad. However, I challenge this point not because there aren't bad people in the company who should be let go, but if you're not able to have managers who are effective at identifying and firing them at the right time, how are they going to be correct at stack ranking them? Dorota (35:02) I mean, I think like there's another thing, like this whole stack ranking idea stops at a certain level. I mean, don't know, SVP or whatever, depending on how many layers the company has, but it's like a few levels down from the CEO. that's where you, I mean, above that, you don't ever let those people go. Warren (35:22) There was an interesting research done about publicizing CEO salaries where they thought that this would cause public uproar with the increase in salary ratios between the CEO and the median salary at every company. And you would think that maybe publicizing this information, high visibility is good. But what actually happened, it made CEOs at other companies who had a lower ratio to the median value be jealous and demand even a higher salary. What's like? Dorota (35:55) Why have less if you can have more? Warren (35:58) I didn't know it was an option. Dorota (36:00) Hahaha Warren (36:03) I didn't know I could have that. We'll have to have a discussion later about that. Dorota (36:08) Well, ⁓ so Warren, do you know what makes you productive? Warren (36:14) ⁓ I think I could say something like, know when during the day I'm being productive and I know that after a certain amount of time or into the evening when I stopped being productive and it's not like directly like I'm directly aware of it. It's that's a weird part. Like I know that I get worse at solving technical problems ⁓ later as the day goes on, but I don't actually see that in the moment while the day is going on. Dorota (36:43) yeah, it's like 11 p.m. It's like, what are you doing? I'm just fixing this one critical bug. Are you sure? Are you of your right mind? yeah, yeah, yeah, my mind is so sharp and clear. And next morning, so many bugs. I recall that situation. Warren (37:00) I don't think that ever happened to me. Here's my fear with productivity that if everyone is standing up and saying, ⁓ LLMs, whatever, make us more productive, are they saying that the engineers are feeling more productive? Because that would be a good thing. Dorota (37:02) No. I think they are feeling more productive. I think as we said that this must be a subjective way because there's no way for us to actually measure productivity unless we talk about revenue or know customer satisfaction however you want to call that which I don't think anyone's actually measuring. In fact we know from the Dora report that those values do not increase. Warren (37:38) Okay, so just a recap from last episode. ⁓ Everyone says they're more productive and LLMs help a lot in every aspect of the job, but if you look at the outputs, they're worse. The stability of the product, the quality goes down. Dorota (37:52) Some of it gets worse, some of it gets slightly minutely better, but it is such a small change that I would just describe. Warren (38:00) certain areas where it's like this process would be better if you suck an LLM in the loop and I think obviously there's even a broken clock is right twice a day, right? Dorota (38:11) Yeah. So, mean, I do think that this is the thing. Individual productivity is subjective. I mean, if it is, I do think it is important to keep your engineers happy. I may be really old school at this point, but I do believe it is better to keep people happy because it's a creative industry and happier people generally tend to do better work. Maybe this is how I am fooling myself. You know, that's my sort of subjective. ⁓ way of looking at it, but it does seem to correlate that generally. I'm not saying like they should be happy, they should feel like we're all family. No, no, no. Just content. Maybe that's a better word. Content engineers just produce much better outcomes. Warren (38:55) the word performing like say all of our engineers are performing better because I like looking at it as a sports team and and while you can be happy that you're say for football, you're on the pitch and you're kicking the ball or you take passes or you're shooting and getting goals. I mean, there's a lot of different aspects there and people do celebrate certain aspects of the game. You know, maybe this is celebration when you deliver your product, a new version or to a new set of users or, you know, get a huge company to come on board. There's a lot of different things there, but generally while you are, you know, heads down looking at the ball, you may not actually feel happiness. You stress there. So I think the word performing would be way way more interesting of a qualification to be using in those circumstances. We should say that AI increases our performance, not our productivity. Dorota (39:44) That sort of sounds off. Warren (39:47) Pick a different metric, I guess, with my point. Dorota (39:49) It's not a metric, that's the thing. Productivity is not a metric. If it is a metric, I want to see the metric! Please show me the metric! Warren (39:52) But I Okay, so if we don't talk about how productivity is the wrong word, maybe we should talk about how do we measure teams effectiveness performance. So, you know, and a 10,000 engineer size company, individual engineer should be. Dorota (40:03) revenue. So you don't have to same thing, like do you need to measure individual engineers? Warren (40:13) Well, I want to say no, but at the same token at this at some point you need to hire people, which means you need a metric for establishing how to hire them. Dorota (40:21) When you're hiring people you have no idea about their productivity. Productivity is what happens after you hire them. Warren (40:26) But what if you could know? Would you hire them based off of that? Dorota (40:29) But what if you could know? How could you? show me your record of your past productivities. But productivity depends on so many things. Sure. Right. What was your environment? Who were you working with? How was the vision communicated? What were your goals? Like all of those things. were the colors in your IDE? Warren (40:32) Well, my point is that... It sounds like you're saying that. So here's a, here's a concern. If the ability for individual engineers to be productive or the organization to meet revenue goals is something outside of their hands, how can we ever have a performance conversation where we actually let people go for not meeting expectations? Dorota (41:05) Here's the thing, there are things that I absolutely pay attention to. Measure maybe is too strong of a word because some of them are not necessarily numeric. One is absolutely customer satisfaction. That's the high level. Our customers generally happy with what was delivered. We can use proxy for customers because sometimes customers cannot be bothered. Are there complaints? Are there no complaints? Are we actually reaching our business goals? That's one thing. The second thing, which ⁓ may be helpful to some managers out there, I actually pay attention to resentment. Warren (41:38) Of whom? Towards whom? Towards. Dorota (41:40) of people on your engineering team, towards other people on your engineering team or their managers. ⁓ This basically boils down to is everyone pulling their weight or does everyone feel like every, that the work distribution is fair? Because I find those are the indicators that something's off and those are maybe the indicators that you should let someone go. And not necessarily because they're a bad engineer, but because they don't fit in this whole environment. ⁓ And rather than focusing on productivity and how many pull requests did you submit? ⁓ I'd say, okay, does everyone think that you're good to work with, that you're doing your part? Or maybe a bunch of people think, okay, know, that person, like I'm not happy because we do all the work and they don't. I've had situations like that before, actually many times. I'd say that maybe is a better way to think about it rather than, was that engineer that we think? We should let go, productive. If everyone else on a team think they're not doing enough or they're not doing good enough job, that should tell you something. Warren (42:45) You still need some aspect that's tied to the business, though. It can't just be individuals, how they feel towards... Dorota (42:50) I don't think you can really truly see impact of an individual in a business because it's always a matter of the whole environment of the whole team. Warren (42:58) Why you need some lever in place to ensure that the team is doing the right thing. It doesn't matter. Dorota (43:04) Yeah, customer satisfaction and the fact that things are being delivered. None of your stakeholders are complaining. And if they do, then you need to investigate why or what are they really complaining about. Warren (43:16) That's the first lover. If your customers, your users, whoever they are, not necessarily Dorota (43:21) Responses whoever's paying whoever's paying this out Warren (43:23) They don't have be external, right? Like, could be other engineering. So once that's out of the way, like once you are comfortable with that, then you go deeper and try to understand. And I mean, that's the point where you're stopping ⁓ because there's an No, but I meant if there's an issue with how the customers feel, how the users feel about the technology that's being output or the teams that they're interacting with, what's the way to dive into that? Dorota (43:26) Absolutely. I'm not st- Well, I mean, you obviously have like actual feedback. You can have conversa- you know, I know some engineers don't know about it, but you can absolutely have conversations with people. You can like meet and say words to each other until you feel like you understand each other. Sometimes it takes a while to actually get through, like make sure that you're talking about the same thing, but you can absolutely do that. then great things happen. Warren (44:15) I think we're getting a lot of angry emails. Dorota (44:18) I'm so sorry. Warren (44:22) Like talk to another human. I can't believe you just suggested that. Dorota (44:25) Well, can just talk to another lemon instead. Good luck with that. Warren (44:28) Yeah, so basically investigate why that's happening and then drill down and figure out where the problem is. ⁓ My theory is that there's always a single responsible individual for any problem that can be resolved. Dorota (44:33) ⁓ that's the way. Sometimes there's multiple individuals sort of enabling each other. Warren (44:46) That's true. One last thing that I know I know you're just dying to share. Dorota (44:50) So it's more like a thought, you know, we talk about productivity, engineering productivity, that maybe is something easy to reason about when we're implementing features. However, what about ops, the operations, know, dev ops, the operation part of that, you just have to run things, where you have to simply keep the lights on or make sure that... Yeah, that's the good question, isn't it? And maybe that's the reason why I have a problem truly understanding Warren (45:11) productive there. Dorota (45:19) this concept or finding its value. Warren (45:22) know some people are going to respond to that as, well, we have a lot of tickets to create infrastructure for other teams, so we got through those tickets, or we wrote a lot of open tofu code recently. We just were able to get through all of those things and get that infrastructure. Dorota (45:34) So you're just doing your job, that's productive. I mean, yeah, okay, great. Warren (45:38) Well, that I think is subjective, like what your job is even because there's an aspect of like what your scope is and what you can deliver in that area. And there is that aspect, as you mentioned, of deleting stuff. So can you imagine, ⁓ we deleted extra replicas we didn't need or cleaned up some F3 buckets. Maybe that was being productive. We got through that work very quickly. Dorota (45:56) You know, when I think what I think the best or the most productive or the really the best operations are, that's when really nothing happens. It's really when everything's so smooth that there's nothing. You have no job basically, that's the best. Because you've automated everything and it just works, right? But is that productive? Warren (46:08) Now we're not doing it. See, I think, but with automation, didn't you remove something? The manual way? So I feel like your core definition of productivity is deleting stuff. Dorota (46:26) That would check out, yeah, that would check out in a lot of ways. Warren (46:29) So you feel most productive when you're removing waste from the organization? Dorota (46:33) Absolutely, you know hit the nail on the head. I think I am something of an anti-horror. I do feel the best when I can remove things. Warren (46:43) Have you considered a career in cleaning staff? janitorial work? Dorota (46:48) I feel like that's what my job is. Warren (46:54) I think that may be a good point to switch over to PICS. Dorota (46:58) Again, pick axes from the mine. Warren (47:00) So what did you bring for us today? Dorota (47:04) Right. So, ⁓ I brought, I don't know if anyone ever brought this here. I feel like it should have been because it's one nifty little thing. ⁓ I'm going to show. Warren (47:15) So she's holding up ⁓ what looks like a credit card sized Dorota (47:18) It is absolutely a credit side piece of, I think it's some sort of carbon fiber. So what you do is that you can switch it off. Warren (47:20) Thanks. Okay, so you can. Dorota (47:27) He does a little bit a transformer kind of play and what it is? It is a tripod Warren (47:33) So it was a credit card that transforms into a tripod. Dorota (47:36) I carry it is for a mobile phone. Yeah, I carry it in my wallet because I travel a lot and sometimes, you know, you have to have a video call and all of that. It's you know, you get tired just holding your phone like that. It's a nice little tripod that's, you know, you can put it whichever way and it's very compact and small. And I don't know if you have said if I said this, I am something of an anti hoarder. No, I don't like the word because it got corrupted. No, no, no. I don't like having stuff. So I generally don't buy what I don't need, but this one was actually one that I'm really happy with. ⁓ It's a nice little gizmo. Warren (48:06) I Is there like a specific brand or company that produced? Dorota (48:17) Yeah, the thing is I forgot but let me just say it says something a pocket tripod ⁓ Warren (48:22) We'll find the link and put it in the description of the episodes. Seems like a great gift. Okay, for this week, I had a different pick, but you convinced me to switch during the episode. And I think my pick is going to be a book called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. She talks about about eight different spectrums that different cultures around the world are on from how they speak to each other, whether high context or low context. Dorota (48:25) Yeah, it's been great. Warren (48:49) concerning the amount of information in the communication that individuals use to whether or not it's a task oriented culture or very high level or whether or not a culture or an individual is thinks organically or has organic conversations versus very structured ones. You know, do you go to a meeting as it always like very direct to the point with a strict agenda or do you talk about a lot of different topics until you find the one that's relevant? Dorota (49:13) It's a really good book. I second that. Why do you like it? Warren (49:18) Well, I think it was definitely eye opening that there is a way that has been sort of measured of how different cultures work so that if you engage in a remote setting or you're in a larger organization that has people in different settings, they may have different expectations on how they communicate. And while there's like always been this joke about the translation between when you talk to someone in the UK and they say something versus the translation to like actual Dorota (49:42) when you say, how are you doing? You say good. American would say, ⁓ no, what's happening with you? And like a Brit would say, wow, this is awesome. Right? Warren (49:52) And with that, ⁓ thanks, Dorota for coming back on. I hope this episode has been great for you. Dorota (49:56) Thanks for having me again. ⁓ I hope it wasn't too boring, you know, productivity. cares? Warren (50:04) Well, did have some concerns starting off, but I think there was a lot more here to discuss than I was prepared for. I'm sorry? I don't know. Well, maybe there was a lot of content here. So you may have said that in the length of time we recorded, we were very productive. And with that, I'll say thank you for coming on the show and thanks for all the listeners for tuning in for this episode and we'll be back again. Dorota (50:11) I'm. ⁓ no.