I worked with one guy who actually tried, on his yearly review, to pass of the number of Jira tickets he completed as one of his primary accomplishments. Anyone want to take a wild guess at the percentage of tickets he closed were tickets he created?
If he was finding valid issues, filing them, and solving them, that's not exactly as malicious as it sounds.
Yeah, I know people could try to game the system with small tickets, but that kind of thing is obvious to any manager who isn't completely asleep at the wheel.
Frankly, as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments. Writing self-reviews and listing personal achievements is difficult, particularly for junior employees. At least this guy tried to put some metrics behind his work. Presumably the manager wasn't so clueless as to take everything at face value.
> as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments
Absolutely agree, and in my job I would address it with more sophistication. My comment was somewhat simplified, perhaps even flippant, for this context.
Did you know this because he was reporting to you?
I find people who are constantly measuring some metric they're doing well on (and this metric always changes) and then making sure you know about it are covering for some sort of performance problem.
Maybe... or they are using metrics from above as drivers.
To create and monitor Jira ticket counts, there has the be Jira tickets for management to pay attention to and compare against other employees.
Maybe the employee is gaming the numbers... but there has to be a game to play - and this no different than basing performance reviews on bugs solved or LOC numbers.
management is probably looking at those numbers? Going to be people who change their focus to reflect that attention from above.
For me, it's when the metric they're proud of is always changing from quarter to quarter, and it's rarely the one we agree to focus on. Like they make a basket of six metrics and usually at least one of them is doing well, but never the same one consistently, so they're always talking about the great performance on whatever metric randomly turned up well this month.
It's kind of like the inverse problem of management obsessing too much over particular metrics that don't properly capture the bigger picture, and can also be gamed.
I agree 100%, but in this case there was no one who mattered measuring tickets closed. At least the group I worked with knew enough to avoid that kind of fallacy. In general, Goodhart's and Campbell's laws both apply.
I understand that there were likely recurring problems with him.
But, people opening jira issues on atomic tasks, refactoring todos, found bugs are generally doing good thing. Yes, you can keep it also on papers around or in .txt file, but if you dont keep it somewhere, it gets lost. And people who dont open jira tickets for these, basically never get around remembering these need to be done.
Also, people who split larger tasks into smaller ones that they track are less likely to forget some aspect of tasks.
Jira is just one way for an individual to track his or her tasks, and TBH it's such terrible software, I wouldn't use it. But, if someone wanted to show off how many deck chairs they re-arranged on the Titanic, it's a good way to track work done.
