Layoff Journal Week 25 - Darkest Before the Dawn

Last week was a rollercoaster. It came complete with the highs of being at the final stages for only the second time and coaching my son’s baseball team to their season-opening win, along with the low of hearing that the offer went to another candidate. Since then, however, I’ve successfully shipped the MVP iOS and Android applications for the startup I’ve been working with (both firsts for me) and started mid-stage conversation with a few more employers. This fall is shaping up to be very busy and hopefully productive. 

Photo by dominik hofbauer on Unsplash

It’s hard to confidently say this is leading to a sunrise because I certainly cannot predict the future, but the traction feels good after so many weeks of waiting on interviews, feedback, and decisions. Either way, I’ve got work to do, and the days and weeks feel short. 

A Mixture of Dark & Dawn Numbers

5+ tech IPOs are looming later this year, signaling some investment and increasing multiples. source

$2,000-$10,000 lost revenue per small business during the Square outage last week source (a gut punch to the small businesses, and Square as well.)

16.6.1 A critical security patch for iOS (similarly available for WatchOS and iPadOS) to remove zero-day exploits from the Apple platforms. source

Dark Encouragement

This will be hard to hear (or do) for some folks, but I will look for jobs on Indeed.com this week. I had written it off as a platform that didn’t have the roles I was looking for, but with my lack of traction on LinkedIn, Otta, and others, it now feels foolish to ignore the dominant player in the online jobs space completely. For many ex-Indeedians, this may be a bridge too far, so my encouragement is to step back and assess what is and is not working and make a change. For me, that’s trying Indeed. For you, it could be giving “spray and pray” a chance (2m read). Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, if you’ve reached layoff week 25 (or more), it’s time to, once again, try something new. Let me know what you try and whether it works!

Developing Velocity

I know it’s en vogue to dunk on McKinsey (after their article “Yes, you can measure software developer productivity” – source). There have been several well-thought-out critiques (15m read), criticisms (14m read), and supplements (10m read) to that article. I won’t take it apart piece by piece, and my goal is not to re-present any of the arguments laid out in those articles. However, given that Indeed did have a unique system of measuring developer productivity through Hindsight (developer productivity index), Peregrine (team productivity index), Delivery-Lead-Time (metric, like cycle time, measuring time from ideation to value creation), and more, I think it’s worth capturing what made that work and where it failed.

It’s natural and, honestly, completely reasonable to try to figure out how to measure developer productivity. Indeed’s systems of measuring code commits, code reviews, tickets completed, impact, time from ticket creation to release, bugs escaped, and more made the team a very data-driven organization. As long as that data remained data, we were okay. Data is not the same thing as information. Information is the derivative of data. You use data and the rate of change in that data to understand something about a system or a person. Information derives into knowledge or meaning that can guide decision-making. And eventually, you can distill this even further into wisdom, which gives you the ability to make educated guesses about the future.

Capturing the data and metrics isn’t bad. It makes it easier for managers to ask questions and learn about their developers and teams. But it isn’t blameless either. That same data makes it easier for managers to give out rewards based on arbitrary effort metrics (e.g. lines of code or the likes.) On the whole, having the measures is a win for the company, but only when coupled with a relentless focus on impact (e.g. outcomes, revenue, percent speed improvements, scalability, security, etc.) and strong coaching that avoids the easy trap of metrics based management.

Fun

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.