EN 25: Small update before the new job

Hey!

These are the resources for today:

• Compassionate Refactoring

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey, Part 1

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey, Part 2

It’s the last day of my long break since January. On one hand, it’s great that a new “chapter” is about to start, now with a slightly different approach, and I feel excited and nervous at the same time. On the other hand, as I’m writing this, there’s a bit of regret of not squeezing the break enough in terms of productivity, learning, and exploring other avenues or projects. If the possibility to rewind to January existed, I’d probably use my time better and pursue some ideas I had that I ended up not doing. Having said that, it’s been productive overall, although not groundbreaking, and a great experience.

I’ll be working as a senior backend engineer in Hectare, which is an agritech company that creates products around the food supply chain. It’s an exciting field, since agriculture plays an important role in a future where food security, sustainable and ethical farming will be key.

As always with a new job, the first weeks will be intense, as there’s a lot to learn and get used to, new architecture, environment, people… If anything, my last stint working as the only developer for months, and having to learn quick the architecture and codebase without much support, showed me that I can handle it just fine. Luckily, the initial part of the onboarding has been good, with a decent Macbook arriving a week before and all the credentials, tools, and company docs already available, and plenty of events in my calendar to know the company.

On another note, McKinsey, the consultancy company, dropped an article about measuring developer productivity that received enormous backlash. After reading it, it’s easy to see why. These types of articles are concerning and unfortunately also highly influential within the CEOs or the exec sphere. It references sources like the remarkable Accelerate book, by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, in an attempt to legitimize its “methodology”, but it only proves that the authors don’t understand what the book is all about nor the research it provides. The two articles I’ve shared today about measuring developer productivity, by Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz, give an excellent response to McKinsey.