Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 114: Story Point Commitments and Measuring Productivity (Episode 79 Rerun)
Episode Date: July 2, 2018In this re-run of episode 79, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: It seems like my teams always miss their story point commitments. Is this normal? How do you change it? How do you actually... measure developer productivity? The article comparing research on productivity in static and dynamic type systems is here. It is a great read. Jamison also mentions Goodhart’s Law. Read more about it here.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey there, this is Jameson Dance from Soft Skills Engineering.
This week, we are bringing you a replay of episode 79
about story points and measuring productivity.
I really enjoyed listening back to this one.
Since recording it, I actually took a new job
where I led a team from not really having any defined process
to doing sprints and measuring story points and velocity.
And it's been interesting reflecting back on my frustrations
and trying to avoid them when implementing it this time around.
I enjoyed listening to this again, and I hope you do as well.
We'll be back with a new episode next week.
see ya it takes more than great uml diagrams to be a great software engineer this is episode 79
of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith
are uml diagrams a joke to you dave do you not understand how serious this is
no sir they're not a joke you put a triangle where you should have put a diamond and people died
oh my gosh oh uml i'm pretty sure i read that book and then promptly forgot all of it and now
my diagrams are they're boxes with lines and that's sometimes they have lines in the boxes too
but no diamonds or arrows no no oh boy it's like abstract uml
it's like an impressionist uml yeah exactly yeah all of the boxes are made up of tiny little boxes
look when you master the art form you can you are then entitled to break the rules yeah that's true
you can play with it a little bit once you have mastered it like i clearly have
this show is an advice show for software developers and other technical people
about non-technical things as you can clearly tell from the intro
and we have a question do you want to take it away dave yeah this comes from a listener named
jameson jameson is this you uh it depends on whether it makes me look good or bad okay
well i'll let you judge that after i read the question okay it says every team i've ever been
fails horribly at delivering the story points they commit to for each sprint this feels really bad
how do we fix this uh that's gotta be old slacker jameson oh yeah me not the one that you might
want to hire no no that's that's all lay about jameson everybody knows he just spends his time
down at the dump drinking moonshine and not hitting his story points
uh yeah that is me this is the first time that we've openly asked ourselves a question
yeah i would like to apologize to all the listeners whose questions we are not answering
in order to answer my own question but dave and i just got started talking about this
and and i really wanted to talk more about it on the air because i feel like
while bad it is not uncommon yes or maybe i don't even know if while bad is the right thing to say
here it's definitely not uncommon though well the part where you feel bad is bad yeah that is bad
um i remember one one oh go ahead that's gonna say but you could fix the feel bad part by just
changing your expectations a little bit and say when we fail to meet our commitments for the
sprint that's when we should feel good problem solved i thought you would say by just not caring
about not meeting your commitments for the sprint oh that's old junkyard jameson talking if you said
that i would say that's what i did yeah i responded with nihilism where story points
it's like did you ever watch whose line is it anyway oh yeah absolutely you know how he says
like welcome to whose line is it anyway where the points don't matter and everything's made up or
something like yes you are the second person to quote that line to me this week about story points
uh yes it literally was about story points i was in like a sprint planning meeting a couple days
ago and someone said that on my team that's been in my head for years and i'm sure i'm not the only
well i know i'm not the only person there's at least one other person i'm sure there's many
there are many more people though yeah but the crazy thing is the timing it just popped out for
you and this other guy in the same week maybe i am this other man also oh i didn't know you do
look alike okay anyway sorry you were saying points don't matter yeah well i guess there are
a lot of ways you could deal with this one one way is to try and get better at estimation and
another way is to say this is clearly a hoop we just jumped through that doesn't mean anything
and i'm just gonna not care as much uh and i've tried both ways and the end result is the same
so far meaning you still don't deliver on your commitments whether you care yeah yeah
and i still feel bad either i feel bad about checking out of this meeting every week or i
feel bad about failing to get better at estimation so if feeling bad is a given what can you do to
mitigate the rest of your broken life i don't know i'm hoping you could tell me well i'll quote
my former CTO who said to me that he thinks that story points are the
greatest invention in software estimation of all time.
He knows or believes something that I do not know or believe.
Well,
did you ever have to estimate software by hour?
Yeah,
actually I did.
And did that go better or worse or the same as story points?
It went the same.
Which is every time you made an estimate,
it was off by a factor of 10.
It was way off.
And then we just failed.
Well, look, my completely wrong estimates are still off by a factor of 10 with different units.
Yeah, exactly.
And the decision to use hours instead of story points was that basically it all comes down to time anyways.
So why don't we just cut out the middleman and then it didn't make it any better.
Cutting out the middleman usually works.
I don't get it.
That was the end man.
You cut out the end.
Oh, no.
huh can you can you explain why your cto felt this just disassociating estimates with time
that's the reason i usually hear yeah he basically said that something some switch
flips in a developer's mind when the developer is trying to determine how much time it would
take to implement something compared to just estimating the complexity of something and by
putting a point number on the complexity you get more accurate time estimates when considered in
aggregate so basically he said as a team everyone estimates their stories they commit to a set of
stories they deliver and then as you deliver those story points can become a velocity which will
predict future deliveries in aggregate for the team over time you know any single data point
can have high variance either a single person or a single sprint for the whole team but that over
time the velocity can serve as a useful predictor of total software delivery yeah that's the dream
and while you're saying that i realized that one of the issues is that i've very rarely been on a
team that will then calibrate how much they decide to do in the next sprint based on how many points
they got done in the previous sprint which is like the core of the approach i know but i know but we
just you know we delivered 25 story points last sprint but and the seven sprints before that but
i'm pretty sure we're gonna do 80 this time but here's what we would like to get done this work
is all important so we will do it in this sprint right instead of instead of however long it's
actually gonna take yeah yeah that's that's a thing i think i i could have done better on teams
by being that negative person on the team who says yeah we can't do this team
yeah exactly that's the other thing no one wants to be that don't believe in yourselves
you're all delusional let's just start with that it's kind of kind of a crappy way to open a
statement i so i have gotten better at estimation in general but not to the point where it's just
like laser accurate about how long it'll take me to do something i have a much better feel for how
for when something will just take me longer than it seems like it should take but i'm still
routinely off by a lot on how long it actually ends up taking me yeah and when you're off it's
not like oh it's 10 off it's more like orders of magnitude right yeah yeah like i just finished a
thing that took twice as long as i thought it would take and there were a ton of unknown it's
a new platform new technology all around so it makes sense it would take longer but i didn't
know how much longer because i didn't know what working with these tools would be like yeah yeah
have you have you ever gone to your product manager or team lead and said we need to build
a small proof of concept to gain full stack familiarity with the things that we're going
to be touching before we can make an accurate estimate uh yes actually yeah we we did that
i would call it a medium scale proof of concept and it took it so it wasn't small scale it was
it was entirely ui focused but the ui all worked and it took like a month or two oh that's that's
a long time for a proof of concept yeah yeah the point was we would get this proof of concept we
would show it to people and and it would work richly so it'd be a lot easier to test with users
and get feedback on without the overhead of building a back-end
to support all the tricky data flow issues that came into play.
It was kind of a waste of time, honestly.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I mean, we learned the tools we were using,
but we kind of already knew those.
They weren't completely new to us in this project.
And we ended up just like rebuilding everything,
including the proof of concept stuff.
Oh, ouch.
Okay.
so it was a one month of investment how many engineers uh it was like three so so basically
a quarter of a year in terms of salary invested for some learning but did you get valuable user
feedback um well yeah we we did i think the dream was this would result in a more firmly defined set
of features because it was at the very very early stages of a product we just had no idea what it
would look like or be and we did this instead of starting to build the real thing right away
to try and nail down some stuff and we got information maybe it wasn't a complete failure
actually now that i'm thinking back on it but for purposes of estimation it wasn't that useful
is what you know it wasn't useful for estimation i guess it was useful in that we were able to
throw it away and we would not have thrown away the real product if we had started building it
right away and we did learn a bunch of stuff from it that influenced how we built the real product
do you feel like you went down a safer more long-term viable path that you maybe wouldn't
have gone down from uh no honestly total waste huge waste no it was a it was a meat it was not
a big enough win for me to say this is amazing and i want to okay this is the right way to build
software okay but i don't know it was a total failure okay anyways so back to the question
dave have you seen this in your software experience yeah i would say almost every team
almost every sprint if the team decides to commit to a set of deliverables in a one two or three
week period they almost all the time fall short of it and isn't that crazy in two or three weeks
as an industry we can't deliver what we promise well think about we talked about goals a couple
weeks ago um do you ever make personal goals and then fail to achieve them i wonder how much of
this is aspirational instead of measurement not commitments to get things done but things to
motivate the team or or the ideal version of what you would like to get done i guess i think we do
idealize it and i think sometimes we when we're estimating we remember that one time that we were
super productive and we cranked out a feature over the course of a day or two and it was amazing
and we felt great and then we use that same personal velocity when we're considering story
points and estimates for future estimation so it's like that one time i was able to be really
focused and deliver something in two days this feels about like that but yeah it turns out that
that two-day thing was incredibly rare in your life and that normally there are interruptions
there are meetings and other things that get in the way of actually staying focused like that so
that tends to spread out to four or five days and so i think i think we are aspirational in that one
way but i think you're thinking of it in a slightly different way yeah i don't know well have you been
on a team or seen a team that has has regularly hit their story point commitments yeah only one
only one team and it was about can you tell the legend of this team
i'm trying to think of a good agile team back when all the fields were green
before brown fields
so i worked on a team at my last company for about six months now i worked on it for about
a year but there was a good six month period where we nailed our commitments every sprint
we did two week sprints we did story point estimation up front before each sprint and
we delivered like a hundred percent of the of the story points committed and then after i left that
team and another lead took over they continued that and i think they did like 13 or 14 or more
sprints in a row of meeting their their commitments a hundred percent and there was a there was a
combination of factors there that that i noticed that they did that i tried to get other teams to
do and then we had about eight or nine teams at the time and the other teams really didn't did
not meet that same standard. And I would say there were a few things that set them apart.
The first one was that they were pretty realistic in their estimates, meaning they looked at past
velocity when they were considering how many points to take on for the upcoming sprint.
Then in their daily standup, they would ask really important questions like,
are any of the stories remaining that we've committed to at risk for my sprint, for this
current sprint? And if so, the team would pounce on that. Instead of just saying, hey, were you
busy yesterday good you were all right next developer hey were you busy yesterday good
you know instead they would go story by story and say is this story gonna make it in this sprint
yes or no is this story gonna make it in this sprint yes or no that's a great point i have seen
and i've i've done and i've seen other people do just defensive sprints or defensive stand-ups
where your job is to like justify your existence exactly like were you busy enough to look good
in stand-up i swear i worked real hard yesterday no blockers yeah yeah i've seen people say those
words with different words yeah i i really dislike that kind of stand-up to me the the team's goal
whether it's a set of stories or something else should be the thing that's reporting status and
the developers are just the mouthpiece for that thing they represent that thing so it's like and
sometimes the person representing that thing is a qa team member or product manager like
say the story's been coded up and now it's in testing the qa person should report on that story
and they should say whether it's at risk for the sprint deliverable or not you know and this team
did a really good job of that i felt like and um other teams i never could really put my finger on
why they weren't able to to meet that same high standard but they didn't so that is the legend
as as the team changed and people moved off that team to other teams did they did they bring that
ability to other teams or was it just something unique about that group of people
that's a good question because i don't get diffused oh i see like did it did it remain
with the team or was it something about a person on that team or something yeah yeah like did
someone leave and then it stopped or i need to follow up with them because that was uh i left
that company about a year ago and um at the time they were still running cranking along they've
probably had some organizational changes since then i should follow up and see another question
is did that team end up impacting the product or the business a lot more than other teams see and
that's or were they just more regular yeah that's that is the very interesting question because like
in the end all the teams delivered a high value for the company but this team was consistently
predictable on a sprint boundary yeah and so it kind of didn't matter like the because the other
team still delivered the value to customers that was needed they built the stuff that was needed
by the time it was needed but within a single sprint they were just utterly unable to get
to that 100 mark every time yeah but maybe it didn't matter in the end right because like they
did deliver stuff and the company's doing great you know yeah yeah so it's this is such an elusive
subject i think so uh it sounds like there might be some things you could do to help your sprints
be more accurate you know you mentioned uh divorcing estimates from time um focusing
your stand-ups on the status of the sprint not on if you worked hard or not yesterday
being real good at your job i'm really good at my job no blockers yeah i should definitely not
be fired yeah oh man i wonder how many stand-ups could be replaced with that that's that's probably
a good thing to look out for as a team lead is when people are saying that and then you get to
figure out why they're saying it and what they should say instead and help them figure that out
i mean how much of it came down there's so many ways you could do this right you could you could
be very conservative in your estimates and then you will yeah yeah exactly like if you commit to
like one story point for our eight developers for this sprint yeah you're gonna get 100 every time
and this team i'm talking about they didn't do that they weren't complete you know slime bags
yeah with the accounting but they also didn't estimate super high either so it was like some
of these story point these other teams that failed to meet their commitments also delivered a high
number of points but i never i never cross-referenced points because every team had a slightly different
calibration so it was kind of apples and oranges to compare them like that yeah you don't want to
get into like promoting people based on how many points their team gets done no we'll talk about
that in our next question teaser oh that is true foreshadowing it sounds like you're almost saying
um yes they were good at this thing but you don't know that it affected their productivity as a
whole yeah but to answer your specific question of i always feel bad because my teams never commit
never deliver their fully committed story points in a sprint this team figured that out
but what you also said is that's the only team so what i should really say is
hey team it doesn't matter no one does this so don't don't worry about it yeah we actually so
one of the teams we changed their approach and we said rather than focusing on commitment focus on
velocity and the question isn't can you commit to and deliver all the points this sprint the
question is how high can you push your velocity each sprint and we changed we completely changed
that for them and we did it as an experiment and uh and once again because these things are
basically impossible to measure i don't really know what outcome it had
but the team didn't feel bad about missing their commitments because they simply didn't have
commitments and instead they were just like let's go big let's deliver as many points as we can this
sprint huh and when i say they didn't have commitments that's not to say that they weren't
committed to meeting certain business objectives they just didn't have sprint boundary numbers that
they had to target each sprint you know they still had big deliverables like hey we have this customer
who needs this by a certain date and they had to hit those targets but on a given sprint it was
like hey maximize your velocity and software development is so tricky because this is all
looking at how you build it through the framework of agile but people build stuff in a lot of
different ways and and say you land on the perfect way to agile software develop i don't does that
even mean that you'll build better products than people who just like yolo and sit down and type
for a whole week without yeah yeah i don't know well i feel better awesome
that was all we were really going for anyway uh old lay about jameson feels better
you were right all along yeah nothing matters just lay about celebrate at the dump
okay dave i can tell you that we have answered this question uh-huh and we have uh fully because
i know deeply the mind of lay about jameson should we move on to the next question yes we should uh
this one's for you to read okay this is from listener john we asked we asked people how to
pronounce their names um and john said pronounce it biblically uh so i think i'll put some echo
on this john maybe john the beloved yeah great show first time listener first time asker a big
time fan do you have those foam hands foam fingers and they have just our faces on them
oh man that would be so embarrassing that's what fans do if i understand fans correctly you do i
am wondering how productivity would actually be measured how can we adjudicate with measurable
results between the whippersnapper who wants to use haskell and the pragmatic tech lead
maybe this is getting into the hard side of soft skills but talk of productivity always
sounds so hand wavy are we talking self-reported developer happiness surveys story point velocities
dollars per developer hour is measuring such things even worth it in any case i want to hear
what you have to think about the elusive p word thanks thanks john the beloved yeah saint saint
sorry saint john i don't know which one saint john the beloved yeah keep adding every time we say
john's name we need to add more superlatives to it great as they do in the bible that's right
i'm pretty sure saint john the epically beloved awesome yeah disciple my last job
there was it's funny he mentions haskell and the pragmatic tech lead because that exact debate
took place should we use haskell the pragmatic tech lead was like should we have a company
and uh we ended up not using haskell but okay i always wonder what would it be like
to actually fail
no plenty of people get stuff done with haskell um they're called academics
i'm sorry we've now offended dozens of people
this is an interesting question and actually productivity did come up in this debate because
one of the strong arguments for haskell is you spend less time debugging because the the strong
and powerful type system helps avoid a whole class of errors and i i believe that is the case and see
it in my work and i i use some languages that have stronger type systems to to spend less time
debugging but there's not really a great measurement of that in fact uh there's a great article
this is about static versus dynamic typing not productivity in general but it's a review article
that looks at all these studies of productivity in static and dynamic languages and it's basically
a wash there there are an equal number of studies supporting either side and how either side will
make you build better software faster that it's hard to tell one way or the other there's an equal
number of fake studies that tell you uh yeah not fake but they're not usually the most rigorous
because it's hard to measure right exactly this is what the question asker is asking um if you
set up people to build something in ruby and haskell how do you figure out which one is more
productive um and that is the question we're trying to answer yeah yeah we've recursed um
well should we just go back to the quote at the beginning of the question
yeah so uh most dank saint john the beloved
i have not been in companies where there's an explicit measure of productivity
it's always been a gut feel which is bad and good for different reasons but i've never seen it
attempted in in the wild um i know it has been a lot have you ever worked somewhere that has like
explicit numerical measures of productivity of some kind i mean beyond beyond sprint planning
stuff yeah it's not really uh that doesn't seem quite the same though none that are stated overtly
yeah but sometimes managers latch on to certain metrics here and there i okay i have seen them
used when people feel that there's a performance problem right um then somebody will pull up source
control and be like oh this person only made four commits in the past month or something like that
yes i've seen that but i haven't i haven't seen them on a dashboard that's like oh uh
ask chief pilot mostank saint john the beloved closed five tickets and and chief pilot lowly
steve only closed three so i better oh man there was a good game there was a company recently that
will their whole company model was you pay them a monthly fee give them access to your git
repository and they will generate reports for you about your people yep yeah i've seen that
and i tried a demo of it just to see what they were doing and uh it was really interesting
because they would identify like drops like changes like this person used to write a bunch
of code and now they've suddenly stopped things you might want to look into but they also reported
like i think what a simple-minded manager would would consider to be basically a top employee
report and uh i think that the real world of software development is just so much more
complicated than that that that kind of metric just does not work it falls apart in really
important ways and it will actually penalize some of your most valuable engineers yeah because
it's wholly dependent on source control which means it's only the code which means it misses
um most of what we do as a job exactly uh which is which is thinking and talking and helping other
people and and um it takes a lot more than just writing code oh yeah i mean there are people where
you see on every team who are holding the team together right like they're answering all these
hard questions they're connecting the dots for people they're helping integrate stuff
but they're not necessarily cranking out code and bug fixes and their work isn't necessarily
reflected in git or in your in your issue tracker and yet they are like the glue and if you take
away the glue the whole thing falls apart right yeah and so there is a law called goodhart's law
that states when the measure becomes the target it ceases to be a good measure i think that applies
a lot to developer productivity because any metric you come up with will will be gamed if you do it
as lines of code people will write long verbose functions just so they look more productive
and they might not even do it deliberately it might it just is a subtle influence in their
behavior yes and also let me just let me just insert here the corollary to that law is that
just because it has become a target doesn't mean that your employees are bad for seeking that
target they might think that it's what you want them to do so they're trying to be good employees
and doing what you want by making longer function names or whatever right so yeah if you do a number
of issues closed you suddenly get very granular issues yeah yeah and and if you incentivize people
like the glue person you talked about if they are disincentivized to answer questions then they're
not going to help the team as much and they'll be doing things they're not as valuable in exactly
i said before we started recording that i think there's a strong case for nihilism here
where it's impossible to measure productivity and you can't do anything which is unsatisfying
because somehow you have to you have to know is this person doing a good job are they getting
better how can i help them get better uh will this person be a good hire like judging productivity
is something you kind of need to do on a team to to promote to fire to hire to just make the
teamwork well if we haven't figured out how to do it what do you do yeah
yeah i mentioned earlier it usually seems like a gut feel thing it does and look i'll tell you
when it comes down to measuring developer productivity the best thing you can have
is someone who is super connected to the people to be reporting on that now the problem with this
is it doesn't scale up so it's very hard to compare across orgs or across teams even but
when you're asking someone like who are the most productive developers on your team the people
closest to the action the manager or lead of that team their job is to know this information and
they'll gather it from lots of data points sometimes it's sometimes it is something that
could be represented as a metric like this person just gets a lot of work done but sometimes there's
caveats there like but the code they produce has a lot of bugs you know yeah yeah um and so that is
the true story of developer productivity you can't put a single number on it because some it's
actually a set of trade-offs like yeah this developer is fast at producing new features
but also has low quality code that requires lots of follow-up this other developer you know does
the opposite like they produce features really slowly but they always work the first time
you know yeah and this developer is good at getting people getting other developers to
produce features more quickly you know so it's like why would you there is no one number because
it takes these multiple different kinds of people on a team to be successful yeah i'm thinking back
through all the people that i work with and i feel like there are there there are like one or two
cases where i where i think of a person and think yes somehow they just were way more productive
than other developers i've worked with but they are pretty rare and the rest of them that that
we're talented developers are like you said they have very different strengths and weaknesses and
complement each other in different ways yeah exactly that's been my experience too the danger
with that is it's subject to all the biases that people are subject to i mean the danger with
measures is they're easy to game they influence people's behavior in ways you might not intend
but brains do that already in in different ways i i think if you if you believe that productivity
is hard to measure and you go by what you know about people then you owe it to yourself to work
hard to make sure you're not being unfairly biased so i have a little story about this
because i was in a similar situation as saint john the dank and when i was right out of college i was
working on my first job and my one year anniversary was coming up and i knew that that meant it was
time for performance reviews and i wanted to know like how can i show my boss that i'm doing a good
job and that i deserve a big fat juicy raise and so i went to my boss and i said hey you know
didn't really mention that my end one year review is coming up but i'm sure he realized that what i
was doing and i said how do i demonstrate that i am contributing positively and doing a good job
you know and i said look if i was in sales i would just show you all the sales i brought in
and it would be a single number that really reflects my entire contribution and it would be
easy but as an engineer like i fix bugs i participate in meetings i do design reviews i do
i write code i build features it's very very difficult to put a number on these things
and my manager talked to me for like an hour about this just talk talk talk and at the end i was like
wow this this is so great he had all these good things to say but i walked away from that meeting
and i realized he has no idea because i tried to figure out what his thesis was and i realized he
doesn't know he just kind of talked about all the different things and i think in the end that's how
you measure productivity is it's actually a long um it's a long discussion because there's so many
facets to it in engineering and trying to find one way to measure productivity is just kind of
a fool's errand but chief pilot most dank saint john the beloved is not a fool no he knows what
Listen to all his titles.
I know.
Yeah.
PhD on the end there.
Yeah.
If you work in an environment that has these numerical measures of productivity, I think you just kind of need to acknowledge that they exist and you might need to do some hoop jumping to look good on them.
But that they are flawed and doing your job well will not necessarily make you look good on those numbers.
And doing good on those numbers will not necessarily make you do your job well.
If you are trying to evaluate people, I think we had a lot to say about how you look at people's worth to the team and to the business.
And if you're looking for good titles, we definitely had a lot to say.
Oh, yeah, we definitely were all over that.
I think we should come up with a formula that you can use that's super simplistic but awesome.
It's like points.
It's almost like story points, but it's like developer value points.
Here it is.
No, I got it.
It's the number of mechanical keyboards you own.
It's disassociated from time.
That's it.
Therefore, it must be good.
I guess technically not, because as you get older,
probably the number trends upwards.
Unless you get into minimalism, and then maybe you only have one.
I think it's no worse than many other measures of developer productivity.
how about that how about that okay if you have if you are trying to measure developer productivity
it has to be better than the number of mechanical keyboards that they own that's the baseline
that's the baseline yeah that's the baseline productivity measure and you need to beat that
it's a pretty low bar but maybe not uh i don't know
i don't know that it's that low i have a lot of mechanical keyboards
and i'm pretty productive that's all right you are have we answered the question absolutely
all right best of luck to you uh sir i don't i don't want to say all the titles again
all right what can people do if they would like their own wait oh no i forgot i was going to say
this we need to come up with a measure productivity for ourselves in the show oh yeah okay
um i mean we could do number of questions answered
it's usually two number of titles invented okay yeah uh i mean just number of times we say words
measure the number of words we say word count that's hard to measure though yeah
someone has to count them yeah that's that sounds expensive duration okay really yeah it's very easy
to measure which means it's a very good measure of productivity that's right because it's low
effort to create number of times you made me spew out my water because i was laughing
number of times i edited out either of us saying um
um only i know that one though yeah do you actually do that oh yeah i had no idea
yeah i do do i say um a lot no oh you do not oh it's you somebody else says um a lot you are
killing our productivity score jameson no i think i was gonna say that well i guess that would be
yeah it's like an inverse measure productivity how long it takes me to edit the podcast that
could be a measure all right i think we've got a winning a winning metric here yes we'll combine
all those into a number and we'll report it to you next week and the units on that number will be what
unitless oh it's a dimensionless ratio yeah it's yeah oh oh but the denominator is number of
cumulative mechanical keyboards between the two of us okay sure yeah all right we'll do it next
week we'll report um what can people do if they would like their questions to be featured next
week or other weeks you can go to soft skills.audio and click the top right of the page where it says
ask a question fill out the form and enter whatever information you like you can give us
your name or leave it off you could be anonymous or give us all your credit cards and social
security numbers if you want to which doesn't matter because equifax already gave those out
that's a little topical humor for you
uh equifax did not give out good ratings on itunes though to our podcast so if you would
like to do something they have not done please do that yes um yeah share it with your friends
we like it when people listen to our show i think we're done are we done i think so the
metrics seem to suggest that we're finished uh it just ticked over to seven
so we'll catch you next week thanks bye bye
