Yes, I’ve worked in companies that use DX. Generally you get a survey once a quarter, and you can see some basic stats like how many PRs/code reviews are happening.

My company leadership does not use these as a one size fits all metric. In fact, the code review & PR stats never even show up in performance reviews. Mainly, they are used to improve systems around dev productivity. Like, we see that generally, we’re shipping less PRs and the survey shows people think it’s getting slow to merge changes. That is an opportunity to look at where our systems are holding us back.

I think broad stats are also probably still useful too. For example, there have been times that I’m reviewing more code than everyone on the team combined. I WANT my manager to know that’s happening and figure out how to even the workload. Or, why is my team shipping like 2-3 times as many PRs as a similar team with similar headcount? It’s not immediately a PIP or something, but it’s highly likely something odd is happening. Could leadership improve direction & focus, make priorities more obvious?

Basically every company I’ve worked for has had some sort of rubric like this. I don’t think that’s inherently bad, it can be quite good for consistency.

I have quit companies that made their performance review systems too onerous/frequent/intense. It’s exhausting to constantly be justifying your existence and having to sell yourself instead of doing the real work.

At one point I was at a 50/50 ratio of time spent documenting/justifying my work vs doing my work, and that was miserable. My level of anxiety reduced my job performance, which created a very unhealthy cycle. Pressure creates diamonds but it also suffocates and crushes most things.

That’s why seeing things like in-context sampling in the article make me suspicious. I don’t think I would be happy at all being interrupted as I’m in flow state to be asked if I could be more productive. I also feel some of this like speed (“time to 10th PR”) or working on new stuff is creating bad incentives.

Fundamentally the most important metric is how hard your boss will fight for you. The second most important metric is whether you can meaningfully discuss areas of improvement honestly and safely with your boss.

If either of those two are out of whack you should question whether to make a change. If I’m missing those I’m not going to be able to do my best work, so it cuts both ways.

Could be worse like crossover