You say that but even in this thread you have tons of people claiming he was actually a bad programmer precisely because he wasn't also shipping code.

Yes it's a bad metric but so many engineers (not just managers) fail to understand that.

> Pretty clickbaity title. This isn't a story about a bad programmer, it's a story about a bad metric, and an even worse manager who followed it blindly

The clickbait is made so that this document can be shared with a future shitty manager. If you send them a link titled "The Worst Manager" - I assure you their first reaction will be to figure out how to get rid of you.

Managers are the bane of this industry and sadly, engineers have to spend an immense amount of time dancing around shit managers.

Bad managers who want to control instead of empower are the bane of this industry.

a manager that truly relies on story points as a direct metric of productivity wouldn't be reading blogs like this in the first place to make themselves better. the article is preaching to the choir of engineers and at a minimum half way decent managers nodding and upvoting. the ones that truly need to read this and embody it will never see it

> worse manager who followed it blindly

And apparently has zero idea of the team's internal working patterns.

It's entirely possible that the subject of the article is a terrible programmer, if he were to sit down and write or maintain something as an individual contributor.

I've worked with people like that, who were pretty bad individually, but brilliant when part of the right team.

Writing code and directly enabling the productivity of others who are writing code are different skillsets.

Obviously there's some overlap, but you're most productive in Tim's role in you're complimenting the skillset of the person writing the code.

> Pretty clickbaity title.

Good. I hope it made you read the article and learn from it.